Azure Analysis Services vs. Entrinsik Informer

Microsoft Azure Analysis Services is best tool which is well suited for many type of scenarios. Like if the organization is dealing with a lot of critical data and need some better analysis and insights for that data then tool serves the best. It helps in depth analysis and getting the desired result which helps in making big decision for any organization. We can create role based access for sensitive data hence it is very helpful for security point of view. Helps in making the business more productive and taking decision based on facts. It is less appropriate for scenarios like where data amount is less and the solution is very costly and someone can get a cheaper solution. Also not suited for environment where user directory do not exist because without the help of user directory role could not be created hence proper utilization of this tool will not be possible.

Incentivized

Most schools that use Colleague (the Student Information System) have either UniData or SQL Server as the back-end database. If a school is currently a UniData school but has plans to move to SQL Server in the relatively near future then I'd advise against moving forward with Informer until after the conversion to SQL Server. There is a tool that will convert some reports, but there are many instances where the tool won't successfully convert the report and it will need to be re-written.

Incentivized

• You can import data from various sources (i.e. Oracle, Azure SQL...)
• You can store data models
• You can elaborate data and create insights
• Perfect integration with Excel and Power BI

Incentivized

• Informer is pretty user-friendly. When teaching other employees how to use Informer, I typically don't have to repeat any steps or further explain how to do certain tasks because of how user-friendly it is.
• Reports in Informer are kept in a list that can be filtered by user, specific tags, or even by how recent the report was made or run. This makes it very quick and easy to find and run a specific report.
• Informer has many options for downloading the report output, including text (txt), comma separated values (csv), and even PDF.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Azure Analysis Services is very costly solution and in that price we can get some better business intelligence tool with lot more of capabilities
• The dashboard or we can say user interface is complex and need time to understand and gain expertise in order for proper working.
• It needs continuation monitoring which is sometime a big task.
• Sometime, the tool shows unusual behavior and become unstable, so we need to clear temp files for proper functioning.

Incentivized

• Informer needs more predefined date formats in its Column Display Editor. The existing 5 do not meet everyone's needs.
• It's a minor UI issue, but Informer's Edit Columns view stutters and displays empty space when scrolling left or right. It may be because I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and Informer isn't designed for input devices that scroll with "momentum" (as Apple calls it).
• The Reports Listing takes longer to load reports than I believe it should. At least a progress bar displays to tell you when it's complete.

Incentivized

Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.

Since I don't know code, there are sometimes calculations that are beyond my knowledge to create. It would also be great to be able to format multiple columns at once (center, for instance), rather than having to format them individually.

Incentivized

We have 10 concurrent licenses and we average between 6-8 at any given time during the day; and we host the application.

Always able to get acceptable solutions in reasonable time from friendly support staff. Initial contact is always with knowledgeable person - not someone reading from a script trying to screen calls. Thanks Entrinsik for being in tune with my needs.

Incentivized

We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.

We have used the IBM cloud which was truly a specific nightmare for our team. User experience, layout, and design is big for us as it understandably is with many people. Even if any type of program can technically do all that we need it to, we still found our team will not be as motivated or satisfied using it compared to something more visually appealing and smooth.

Incentivized

Our organization used to use the built in reporting tool for Datatel, but it required more knowledge about SQL so only a handful of users could actually use it. There was no customization of the output or ability to schedule the queries. If you wanted something more complex than what was available, then the programmers needed to write an extraction program to pull the data you needed

Incentivized

• Website analytics; We have realized so many benefits like traffic analysis, CRM, click-through funnels, and many more.
• Aas allows us to do complex calculations and aggregations at slight efforts. It accommodates DAX expression, which in return is simple to apply.

Incentivized

• We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
• Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.