What is our primary use case?
My company, we work as consultants. We help set up the environment for our customers. We do the initial setup for the customers so that they can use it.
To a certain extent, we also set up dashboards and workplaces within Power BI for customers and run automation.
Our customers are mostly in security, finance, and some marketing companies.
What is most valuable?
The dashboards are valuable. We use them to help customers who are scattered across multiple countries. We can scope the access and information so that only relevant parties have visibility to what is relevant to their environment.
I haven't used real-time data processing much. It's more about the dashboards, where we play around. We work on Microsoft 365 and Azure and populate the dashboards with that information. Then, the dashboards are published to the end users so they can view relevant information.
The AI support is really good. We have plans to use the AI mechanisms and algorithms that Power BI uses to publish more easy-to-understand reports for our customers. We don't have to start things from scratch when we have metadata via AI. It integrates with the existing Power BI system and pulls up the data. It feels like they are being more open so that the data can be easily readable, and then using AI, it can be published in a better way.
What needs improvement?
The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out.
Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out.
The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins.
So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Power BI for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is quite stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. I haven't heard any complaints from our customers.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. It still needs some more things within the system.
Our customers are mostly medium and enterprise businesses.
How are customer service and support?
The support has been good. It takes time for them to respond, but when they do, they are helpful. I would give it an eight.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy. It's quite easy. Not that complicated. You just need the license, and then you're done.
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy.
It takes a couple of hours, four hours to eight hours.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
It did positively impact ROI. From a time perspective, at least four to six hours are saved because a lot of manual work is eliminated. Things are easily available, so people can do their work more efficiently.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
When you have more number of users, like we have one customer with 200,000, it's a bit expensive. But I feel it's reasonable for small-scale customers.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend exploring it. A lot of features are available within Power BI. People complain that they want this or that, but everything is there. Explore it more, read through the documentation, and that would be helpful.
Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: