MicroStrategy - Why, When & Where ??
Updated June 11, 2016

MicroStrategy - Why, When & Where ??

Abanish Mishra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Analytics Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with MicroStrategy Analytics

Microstrategy is used as a reporting solution in my work environment. Microstrategy is used to interact on Hadoop, Microsoft SQL Server Tables, and SSAS MDX Cubes. Microstrategy's Visual Insight is used as a self service tool replacing Pivot tables & graph building in Excel.

Pros

  • Visual Insight is a very good tool for data discovery and for create quick dashboard presentation. This is is basically a online web based portal where you have capability to quickly slice & dice the data . Also it provides you options to create derived metrics & derived attribute (MSTR 10) with various mathematical or statistical functions. One of the major mention would be the map based data visualization where you can plot data based on Latitude & Longitude.Also with MSTR 10 following limitations were removed i) using hyperlink ii) HTML 5 is implemented instead of Flash ,so easy to be rendered in mobile too iii) Adding images is possible for hardcoding company logo & symbols
  • Drilling Capabilities. This requires some good backend data modeling. Once you bring in all the facts and dimensions you are supposed to establish relationship between them & create hierarchies. Then it would be easy to drill more & more. For example - Device hierarchy - (Device Used by User--> Browser-->Operating System)
  • Data Source Connectivity.
  • Enterprise Manager is basically BI to BI environment which is used by administrators or executives to track reporting usage, report performance,developer efficiency or frequency of usage & thousands of other statistics which proves to be very helpful in monitoring the efficiency of the whole environment. Once you set up Enterprise miner( which is a bit tricky) you will be able to access all the in built documents or you can custom built dashboard based on your usage

Cons

  • Visual Insight have multiple limitations. Few of them are listed here - i)Cannot change default graph colors ii) text/graph formatting are very very limited iii)Add metric to Color by / Thresholds is not possible iv)one of the worst limitation of the VI in older versions is that it is not possible to create filters that apply only to a specific visualization. For example if there are 4 graphs in one dashboard & if you have filters then those filters would be applicable for all of them
  • Some formatting options are not there either on Web or Developer especially while dealing with a document. We have to use both Web & Developer to solve issues.
  • While connecting with MDX cube reporting loses a lot of features.
MicroStrategy Analytics is not only a visualization layer but also data modeling tool itself. So you can bring in all your facts and dimensions and define the relationship in architect mode to build intelligent cubes. It shouldn't be mixed up with a visualization tool like Tableau which doesn't have any other capability (data architect and mining). Companies who need to use it only as a visualization layer tool shouldn't use MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
9
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9

Comments

More Reviews of MicroStrategy Analytics