Item: Sisense
Rating: 9
Author: Wicus Verhoef

Overall Satisfaction with Sisense

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SiSense is used to distribute data and information inside our organisation such that the right colleagues have access to the right data, ultimately to service our customers better. SiSense's configurable cube-level and row-level security makes this data and information sharing possible in a way that is compliant.

Pros and Cons

Pros

From the admin/data engineering perspective: Data preparation is very intuitive - the Elasticube builder interface makes the creation of the data structures (Elasticubes) very straightforward.
From the content creator's perspective: Dashboards are easy to create, maintain, copy and backup. Also, there are community-created D3 visualisation add-ins, which extends the standard set of widgets.
From users' perspective: Dashboard interaction is intuitive. Downloading the data underpinning graphs and tables (widgets) are easy.
From data compliance officers' perspective: setting data access controls are easy; these can be implemented at a dashboard level, Elasticube level and row level.

Cons

Elasticube builder only works on Windows (set to change in future releases).
The smallest possible rollout is to install SiSense Server on a Windows server. There is currently no stand-alone desktop version.

Likelihood to Recommend

SiSense is great for going from zero to publishing engaging dashboards to a big audience quickly. You can quite easily go from having nothing to publishing sophisticated and beautifully designed dashboards in less than a week. Learning to use the technology is easy, pulling in data is easy and modeling data relationships is easy. Dashboard creation is also very intuitive and the so too is dashboard interaction.

If your use-case involves small installations with few users and/or a need to have offline access to packaged dashboards, SiSense might be a bit big for you: Sisense currently only has a server-based solution. To get to your dashboards you need to either have access to the machine where SiSense Server is installed or have web access to said server. There is currently no lite reader or desktop-only installation. This limitation would not have an impact in instances where the goal is to roll out an enterprise-wide BI solution, though.

Sisense Feature Ratings

Sisense Support

Support Rating

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

Sisense Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Bug Resolution

Exceptional Examples of Sisense Support

We had a very important demo to clients involving some data shown in SiSense dashboards. An hour before go-live we discovered that some content was not displaying properly. After contacting SiSense support and immediately getting help, the problem was traced to a misconfigured third-party plugin. SiSense's support was instrumental in zeroing in on the problem and solving it, saving the demonstration.

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Go from nothing to an enterprise BI solution quickly

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