TrustRadius Insights for Microsoft BI (MSBI) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Real-time Analytics: Users have appreciated the real-time stream analytics feature for making prompt business decisions. This functionality has been instrumental in enhancing their decision-making processes and improving overall efficiency.
Customizable Workspaces: Customers have highlighted the ease of customization for different project groups through a dashboard and drag-and-drop interface. This flexibility allows teams to tailor their work environments to specific project requirements, promoting collaboration and productivity.
Comprehensive Environment: Reviewers liked that Visual Studio integrated various development aspects, providing a comprehensive environment for different tasks. By combining database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development within one platform, users can streamline their workflows and accomplish diverse tasks efficiently.
Microsoft BI is being used by 2 departments: Financial Controlling and Quality. It addresses financial reporting issues on a monthly basis and overall quality reporting in terms of SLA and customer answers.
Pros
Integration process in IT Architecture
Ability to adapt with process
Cons
Graphical standard reporting
Using on premise, could be great to use it in the cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
How clear is your process? What type of reporting do you need?
What kind of sources do you have?
We use Microsoft BI to build out platforms that allow a wide range of users and audiences to interact with relevant data in near real time. This allows the users to make better business decisions enabling them to increase sales, manage expenses, and avoid risks.
Pros
Microsoft BI is very easy to use and provides a number of interfaces that allow developers to build out solutions in the manner that is easiest for them. Development can be done nearly entirely through GUI interfaces, or you can do advanced programming and application integration.
Microsoft BI provides enterprise class Business Intelligence for a fraction of the price of their competitors while at the same time making it far easier to manage the entire platform.
Microsoft BI is already integrated with your entire Office suite and easily integrates with SharePoint, SQL, all Microsoft Products, as well as any third party software or data you use.
Cons
The latest versions of Microsoft BI has addressed nearly all of my complaints. The only remaining item would be the ability to uniformly color coordinate metrics across the entire reporting platform. Example, automatically Profit should be Green while Loss should be Red in any chart. Or Wisconsin should be Green and Minnesota should be Purple. This is VERY minor to me, but to some customers this can be a bigger deal.
Likelihood to Recommend
I can no longer envision a reason I would not recommend Microsoft BI to a customer in nearly any situation that they were looking to solve a BI problem.
Overall it is a robust BI platform that is not difficult for a technically-oriented person to learn and use.
I am a huge fan of Analysis Services and actively try to find ways to get data into cubes for reporting. While learning MDX may be one of the more difficult aspects of MS BI, it is powerful and anyone who has prior experience using T-SQL alone to build complex reports can appreciate its power.
Cons
I have been disappointed in how all the front-end delivery tools have been centered around Excel and SharePoint. I understand it from a business sense but I much preferred the ProClarity interface as a stand-alone ad-hoc reporting tool. Many end-users are intimidated by merely mentioning pivot tables and therefore do not even try to create their own queries.
