Microsoft Business Intelligence is a quick and cheap way to start practicing with data visualization.
December 07, 2018

Microsoft Business Intelligence is a quick and cheap way to start practicing with data visualization.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft BI

Microsoft BI is currently being used across the organization by all departments who have staff interested in tapping the hidden value of their data. It allows users to create their own queries and visualize them without a large time investment to learn the software. Ad hoc reporting is easier to accomplish using MS BI than some of the other data mining software out there.
  • Easy to learn the software.
  • Allows complex queries to be created ad hoc and ran against databases quickly.
  • Gives the users the ability to empower their departments by setting up easy to implement visualizations.
  • Understanding the full scope of the software takes a lot of time.
  • It doesn't handle very large datasets well, importing can take a while.
  • I have not found a way to build scheduled reports.
SQL server allows for a member of the database administrators team to assist the end users with queries designed to pull information out of the back end databases. With Microsoft BI the end users can be given connections that allow them to create their own queries, pull the data out, and visualize it for easier consumption.
Very affordable, well suited for anyone who wants to try out business intelligence and data visualization without a large time investment up front to get it going.

Not appropriate for very large databases, it can take large datasets a while to load into BI. Not a lot of granularity provided out of the box, though there are many add ons to provide further functionality available.

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
5
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
6
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
6
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
4
Delivery to Remote Servers
6
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
7
Predictive Analytics
6
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
9
Responsive Design for Web Access
7
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
REST API
6
Javascript API
7
iFrames
6
Java API
7
Themeable User Interface (UI)
6
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
7