Microsoft BI Reviews

There are several different use cases. The most basic use case would be just to be able to share data from a database or a data repository. That's the most basic use case.

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization tool, is a BI tool. There are more than 1,000 use cases that you could use. There are countless use cases for which a BI tool or visualization tool could be used for.

The simplest use case is where a colleague in an organization who does not have any coding skills or does not have any technology background wants to be able to look at some data from a database or a repository of data. He or she could use Power PI just to be able to connect to that system and just take a look at or peek into that database. It is as simple as that.

Over the last six years, Microsoft Power BI has evolved, matured, has brought in a lot of new features. Six years back, when I first started using Microsoft Power BI, it was just one of the tools among the crowd of tools that I had access to and may not have been that interesting, at that point in time. It was fairly rudimentary and fairly basic in terms of its feature capabilities. However, in the last six years, Microsoft has put a lot of focus and effort into developing it further, and has, on a regular incremental basis, started deploying and enabling capabilities and features, which now makes Microsoft Power BI one of the leading BI tools in the industry.

We realized the benefits very quickly. In 30 minutes, a company can begin to realize the benefits.

In the most basic use case, which is for a user to be able to just access a data which he or she normally would not have been able to himself or herself, since they don't have SQL query knowledge, or they don't know how to access, log into a SQL Server or a database. They can do that using Power BI within half an hour or less.

Like any typical BI visualization tool, Microsoft has several features. The most interesting feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's very user-friendly.

It is a cloud-based BI tool even though it does come with a desktop client. The ability for a very beginner, basic user to get started with Power BI is very easy. Even if you don't have Microsoft licenses and just want to use a tool for analyzing data, without having to share it with others, you can do that with Microsoft Power BI.

I'm comparing this with other existing and newcomer BI tools. The look and feel of the tool has, only like a month back, undergone a major change. If not, for the last five years at least, last four years at least, the look and feel have been very, very similar all the time. 

It did not change much in the last four years. Barring a lot of functionalities and capabilities being added, it did not change much. The look and feel were pretty much the same. However, about a month back, the latest release of Power BI, they made some further, drastic changes to the way the buttons and the panels are set up. That said, they can do more. There are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs.

I've used the solution for six years now. 

The solution is quite stable and we have not had any, not come across significant bugs, so far. We've only come across some features which are missing or could have been improved, like certain types of charts that were missing in the past, which are being added. Some of the advanced charts are available as a paid service from third-party partners and not available out-of-the-box. There are very unique features or some very specific capabilities that were missing or are still missing. We could always manage it by bringing in a partner to create an add-on or something like that.

The solution is very scalable and we do plan to increase usage. 

We haven't opted for technical support yet as we have a few other tools which are also being used by the organization, in the new organization that I'm in, right now. Power BI was being offered to colleagues to use on a self-service basis. There were communities and subject matter experts within the organization who had offered their services to the wider organization to come and ask questions. It was basically community-based support, I would say, within the organization. 

Also, Microsoft offers free community-based support for Power BI and proactive support is simply paid. It's paid service from Microsoft and other partners, so we have not opted for that yet, something we will look into once it comes to that point. Yet, it's a fairly mature product. We don't think there would be issues with the platform. The issues would be more to do with how to use the platform, or how to use the platform in conjunction with other systems, other software, et cetera, which is more specific to our organization rather than something the vendor has to support us with.

You do get your questions answered eventually, however, you have to wait maybe one or two days to get the questions answered.

Positive

I have used more than ten to 15 different types of software in the past 20 years.

I have used Tableau and I have used Qlik Sense. These two are, I would say, the top two leading platforms. We switched completely to Power BI, however, we started using Power BI more, alongside Tableau and Qlik Sense. The organization where I used to work previously had the commercial ability to acquire multiple software, depending on use cases, or depending on business requirements, or needs. In the previous organization, the organization was using one particular platform, then they decided to bring in a second platform, then they decided to bring in the third platform. As part of that mix-and-match scenario, we ended up using Qlik Sense and Tableau. And then we also started, in parallel, using Power BI, which then started to get better feedback and reviews, in general, so we ended up using it more and more.

It comes bundled with Office 365. Office 365 is a SaaS-based office suite. Anything that you build on your desktop or Power BI, you can publish into the Office 365 cloud environment. It's relatively easy to get everything up and running. 

It's as simple as taking your credit card and buying an Office 365 license and configuring the AD group and you can be up and running. Of course, depending on how secure and structured you want to make your entire setup, it can take a few months, sometimes, with the full rollout to happen. 

A very basic pilot rollout can be done in a matter of a few weeks.

For the actual deployment and configuration, we just needed five people, and five resources working between six to 12 months. Some were required only for six months. Some are still continuing as part of further enhancements as some of the resources are being retained from a training and onboarding purpose so that they can do a training of the wider organization, and colleagues in the organization, show them how to use Office 365, and get trained on that. The actual development itself took less than two or three months.

In terms of maintenance, there are regular patch updates that get pushed from Microsoft. The backend IT support team needs to ensure all the patches are tested before they're deployed in production, for all the users to use.

Microsoft usually sells through a partner, most of these licenses, and Microsoft also usually recommends a partner. In our case, we did an RFP to bring in the subject matter experts, partners who are certified on Microsoft platforms.

We had a system integrator who came in and helped us deploy and roll out Microsoft 365. As part of that, as I mentioned, we got Microsoft Power BI. 

We are now thinking if we should switch on all the other capabilities of Microsoft Power BI or not.

We have noted an ROI, however, it varies from use case to use case.

There are some use cases in which if you deliver it, the cost savings or the revenue generated from that, or the benefits from that one single use case will cover the entire cost of all 65 licenses, for the entire year.

Then there are use cases, in which you'll have to wait for a few years or months before a company will actually see some benefit being derived.

They have made the desktop client free of cost, which is also what Qlik Sense is. The Qlik Sense Desktop is free of cost. Tableau, the web version of Tableau online, there's a trial period you can use it for. Microsoft also has made Power BI available as a free add-on, or a free complimentary add-on alongside Office 365 for corporate users. This means even if the organization does not want to use Power BI, if they're using Qlik Sense, Tableau, Looker, ThoughtSpot, Domo, or the other tools, Power BI will still be available to them when they're using Microsoft Office.

While it comes bundled with Office, you don't have to buy any additional licenses, just for building and publishing. That said, the moment you want to start sharing your reports, your dashboards, and your analysis with others, that is the point where you need to then start paying for additional capabilities or plans.

I've always been part of different transformation programs where we were required to evaluate a BI tool, to meet the business requirements. Usually, Power BI ends up coming in the short list of products from a BI perspective, from a BI reporting perspective, apart from sometimes Tableau, and Qlik Sense. Sometimes, we also come across ThoughtSpot, Sisense, and Domo. These are some of the other tools which we have also, sometimes, shortlisted.

The differences have become very, very minimal between solutions. There are very few, minor differences between different tools. About four or five years back, there used to be drastic capability gaps between the different tools. Four or five years back, Tableau was the most mature, followed by Qlik Sense, followed by MicroStrategy, followed by a few other tools like SAP Analytics, or a few others. Today, Power BI is alongside Tableau, and Qlik Sense is in the top three. That's based on my experience of having worked on all these three platforms. Tableau, among the three, has the best UI, user interface. Qlik has the best performance, in terms of building complex data models. Power BI, however, is the easiest and most fun to use when it comes to getting somebody to use the tool from scratch. 

There are a few other benefits and strengths. Qlik Sense and Power BI, both come with built-in ETL which is data integration capabilities. They have very mature data integration capabilities, as compared to Tableau, whereas Tableau has very basic integration capabilities. You need to buy another ETL product for it to be able to do a similar level of data transformation as Qlik Sense, or Power BI.

We are a customer and may also be a Microsoft partner, as we are a telecom. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We deal with government agencies that compile stats and data. For instance, the use cases for the department of education are all school-related. They need to know the number of schools in a given region, attendance, etc. They also need to monitor monthly changes in the data, so they run analytics to see where enrollment and attendance are dropping or how schools are performing. 

Recently, we developed an application for the South African statistical bureau. They use Power BI for their dashboards to show precisely how many people were counted in which areas, and where they have the challenges. We have different use cases depending on the project and the client's requirements.

It's deployed in the cloud because Microsoft has switched to offering Power BI as a service. Most of our clients are doing all of their business intelligence primarily on the cloud, but we still have clients that are running SQL who prefer to do their own intelligence internally instead of using cloud solutions.

The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics. 

There are probably several other useful intelligent tools included with Power BI that we never use, but they might be good for other use cases. For instance, if you're selling consumer products, you might benefit from Power BI's ability to track sales performance. But our government customers mostly use data visualization internally to make decisions. 

I'm not a heavy Power Bi user. I use it as my CRM, and it gives me all the information that I need. I haven't found anything that isn't useful for what I'm working on at the moment. Maybe later, I might think of something and find that Power BI doesn't have. It's quite an improvement compared to using Microsoft SQL for business intelligence. 

We've been working with Power BI for many years. Before we started using Power BI, we were on SQL SSIS and SSRS. We've been in the BI business launched back in 2003. Most of our business was business intelligence even though we didn't have a lot of analytics. 

We do quite a lot of data warehousing, business intelligence, etc., but when we started, we were mainly dealing with data manipulation. I would say it has been more than 15 years.

I don't have any complaints because we used to be a partner of a company that set up our environment. They are a sales partner, and our sales are very good, but there were always issues with the technical support. At the moment, I would still recommend everyone to move to Microsoft Power BI regardless of their environment.

It's highly scalable and stable. 

One of the vendors we used to work with was Qlik, but we found that Qlik's support wasn't as good as what we're getting from Microsoft. With IBM, the biggest challenge was that companies didn't have the analytics skills to use their solution. Customers would complain that it didn't do what they wanted it to do, but it is not the tool. It's the skill that you have on the market. 

Microsoft made sure they certified competent solution implementers. It was great. We were privileged to be one of those companies that Microsoft picked, and they helped us train some of our technicians to be adept at some of these solutions.

All of our technicians are certified, so Microsoft refers certain organizations to us locally for help implementing their solutions. We have a solid technical team, especially around the Microsoft Power Apps, including Power BI.

Deploying Power BI is straightforward because they've made it so easy with cloud solutions when they came out with the Microsoft Power Apps. Power Apps includes Power BI, Microsoft Flow, and some others. I do everything myself, so I can do my workflows in the background of Power BI on all the applications even though I'm not an everyday applications development person. I haven't done development in years.

With Power Apps, you don't necessarily need to install anything because it's already there on the cloud. You customize it and point it to your data sources. Within a couple of minutes, you're done. Then from there on, you can customize your reports however you want. I think it's effortless to work with.

The number of people needed for deployment depends on the size of the organization, and the scope of what you're trying to do. You may have a small organization with fewer than 500 people, but they might deal with a lot of data. That means the project is going to be very big. 

Conversely, you could have an organization with about 2,000 people, but they are not a data-intensive organization. Then you will need just a few people. For much larger organizations, you'll find that you might need to have the whole applications development team of between five to 10 people for the actual implementation, including your project manager, business analysts, and various technical support personnel.  

For a big organization, you would maybe have five technical guys, including your lead as well as two senior technical people and two juniors. Then as the project grows, you can add four more. At the end of the day, we're looking at about five to 10 people for a bigger project.

However, it's not the same as an on-prem deployment. Most of the work is customization because everything else has been done on Azure. Generally, with things like your standard Power BI deployment, you need just about five people. That includes the project manager and the business analysts plus two or three technical people. 

You do an installation and all the customization a client wants, but from there on, you run out of work to do because everything is running smoothly. I've heard some say that it's making people lazy because if you do everything correctly the first time around, you won't have anything to do for a couple of months except maybe change a couple of things for users. From the technical point of view, you find that you have absolutely no work to do until you move on to the next client. The deployment is quick versus how long it used to take as before we went on to Azure.

You don't need a large team for maintenance because somebody else takes care of it. At most, you need two or three technical people and then an account manager. Probably about three. You're not managing the service or the infrastructure. You are just managing the environment.

The management is much easier compared to how we used to do it before. You needed maybe six or seven people, with some managing the environment and others the infrastructure. For example, the department of education has a user base of more than 500,000 people, but the whole environment is managed by two people. With the Azure infrastructure, everything running in the background is taken care of. 

The return on investment with Microsoft is quite good. The value of the product is far higher than the price you pay. The most significant added value with Microsoft products is their ease of use. If you buy things like Power BI, you become a Microsoft partner and gain access to some customer training, so you learn to optimize everything related to Power BI.

They go the extra mile. They have the training online, so when you get stuck, you can go through the training and know exactly where you made a mistake instead of going out to a training institution and spending a lot of money for precisely the same training. The licenses you pay over five years don't even make a dent in some companies' budgets.

For instance, one of our customers was running a Software AG solution analytics solution. Even though we are a Software AG partner, we suggested they go with a different solution because of their budget. We implemented Power BI, and now they don't want to go back to the previous product because they're saying this one is much more user-friendly than before.

Most of the customers we work with go for volume licenses. Some pay annually or get a more extended license for three to five years. All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years.

I think that's helpful because most government institutions budget on a five-year basis. They have a five-year plan broken down into an annual OPEX. The CAPEX will be five years, and everything else would be OPEX. Most of these licenses get put on an OPEX whereby the client pays once. Then for the five years, they don't necessarily have to worry about anything with Microsoft.

These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid. I guess that is a risk you take in business.

I would rate Microsoft BI nine out of 10. We buy from a couple of vendors, and Microsoft is always at the top of the list for ease of use, simplicity, and cost. I've used the other vendors, but I'm still in love with Microsoft.

In January, I successfully published my application on AppSource, specifically targeting retail customers. Recently, I received positive feedback from a customer, which was truly gratifying. It seems that my application is Microsoft's preferred choice as it effectively addresses the majority of customer requirements and is tailored to their specific requests. 

Apart from retail applications, I have also developed solutions for BigChange, an organization dedicated to driving significant changes. Additionally, I have worked on creating reports focusing on production efficiency within my company. These reports have been well-received and have provided valuable insights. Lastly, I have recently worked on an application that involves managing IT resources and has developed a multi-dimensional model including SSIS and Power BI.

For the last project, I worked on creating data flows and implementing incremental refresh functionality. However, there was an issue we encountered regarding the date field in the tables. The existing portal dates were incorrect as they did not reflect changes in the records. To address this, we collaborated with the developers to introduce an additional column that accurately captures modified data in the system. This improvement has proven to be significant, and it can be implemented using the pro license, rather than relying on the premium license, as the premium license covers different aspects.

The Pro license offers great features such as incremental refreshing, which is highly beneficial. While it doesn't include direct query capabilities, I believe that many customers don't actually require direct query functionality. 

Currently, the developers in my company are busy adding a column in the API as part of our transition to BC Start. Our intention is to gradually migrate our customers to SQL Server, and that's why we are using the app.

In a simplified manner, when working on-site, you cannot directly connect to the regular table without using APIs. That's why the APIs need to be modified to include an additional column, making it suitable for incremental refreshing. Apologies for any disruption caused, but I hope this explanation clarifies the situation.

They find Power BI's data pull mechanism to be sufficient and cost-effective, especially considering the stability it provides. In comparison with other solutions, Power BI stands out as a fantastic choice. Therefore, I would definitely recommend sticking with the Pro license.

I believe there is room for improvement in terms of authentication and certain functionalities in Power BI. For instance, adjusting the width of columns is not easily done, as there is only an option to enable or disable automatic adjustment. 

This can be a significant drawback for clients who desire more flexibility.

Additionally, changing styles and formatting options for numbers require external tools, which can be inconvenient and time-consuming. Ideally, Power BI should incorporate these features within its platform to enhance user experience and eliminate the need for external tools.

I understand your frustration with the lack of automation and dynamic features in Power BI, particularly regarding the assignment of dynamic titles and content titles. While there are some options available for creating dynamic titles, they may not fully meet your specific requirements. It would be ideal to have more flexibility in manually assigning the desired typography for each call and dynamically setting content titles. Although it is possible to find workarounds for these limitations, I believe Microsoft will likely address these issues in future updates to improve the user experience. Despite these shortcomings, Power BI remains a powerful and highly capable application, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I have a strong belief that within the next couple of years, or even sooner, significant advancements will be made in Power BI. These advancements will make it even more powerful and I am confident it will become truly exceptional. I have complete faith in the future development and potential of this platform.

I have been working with Microsoft BI since the start of 2020.

I am working with the latest version.

Microsoft BI is very stable.

Microsoft BI offers scalability, particularly with the availability of premium capacity. With premium capacity, whether it's per user or a dedicated resource, Microsoft BI can effectively handle increased data volumes and accommodate growing user needs. 

Microsoft BI offers scalability in specific areas, but it is important to note that scalability options are limited to certain aspects and may come at a higher cost. For instance, the premium package, which starts at around $5,000 or more, provides enhanced scalability features. However, if you opt for the per-user licensing model, the scalability may be constrained as it is tied to the number of licensed users. Therefore, in terms of scalability, the per-user option may have limitations compared to other packages.

I wrote to Chris Web, and he replied to me immediately. He is the principal program manager at Microsoft.

I have him I have him working And, usually, I don't contact them, only when it is something serious. top expert and experts, and they reply, you know, has been one for us. It's great

In my professional experience, I have primarily worked with AS (Analysis Services), Power BI, and SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services).

Last week, I worked on creating SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports and integrated them with SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services). Additionally, I hold a Microsoft certification in this field.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to set up. it is very intuitive.

Perhaps it's because of my experience and expertise in the field that I approach things with caution. I don't take things for granted. Just because I obtain a certain result doesn't automatically mean it's correct, as there may be errors that are not displayed.

It's important to carefully check the measurements and ensure their accuracy, especially for beginners who may not be familiar with these nuances.

Maintaining the system is not difficult due to the availability of the admin platform. When it comes to permissions and access, it becomes straightforward as long as the customer's requirements are clear. 

You can easily define the level of access they need, whether it's building, reviewing, sharing, or restricting data access for online viewing. Depending on their specific needs, setting up gateways and configuring other settings is also simple. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of their security requirements and engage in discussions with the customer to determine the best approach. 

Often, customers may not be fully aware of what they want to achieve, and it's our job to help them identify their needs.

Especially for clients, it's important to understand that achieving the desired outcome is not as simple as just completing the task and generating the report.

There are several factors and considerations that come into play. Careful attention needs to be given to the creation process by different stakeholders if you truly want to achieve an exceptional result. 

Even small changes, such as removing certain elements from the selection or adjusting formatting, can have a significant impact on the report. Users may perceive the tool as being the same regardless of these details, but the difference between a subpar report and a high-quality one lies in the expertise and knowledge of the creator.

There are various options available for creating reports, particularly focusing on online reports. However, the foundation of the process lies in Power BI Desktop. Whatever we develop in Power BI Desktop can be published and accessed through a unified platform and tool. 

Data flows enable us to make necessary modifications, similar to working with Power Query and related functionalities. Personally, I find working with Power BI Desktop easier due to its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface.

You can gather data from various sources, including data flows, RBI databases, and SharePoint, among others, and then create and publish your report. While you do have the option to connect to online sources directly, I personally find that working with local data feels faster, at least for now.

Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market.

I haven't had the opportunity to work with other tools as I found Power BI to be excellent. No one has specifically asked me to explore other tools.

However, I did purchase some tools on my own for personal learning purposes, particularly for tabular data. I may consider exploring other tools after June 15th, once I have completed my Microsoft exam DP-500 for Synapse.

Power BI is a complex tool that should not be taken for granted.

Its capabilities and functionalities are multi-layered, and the more you delve into it, the more you realize how much there is to learn. 

It can be both challenging and fun to explore the different features and unlock the full potential of Power BI.

As a BI developer, I joined the company without prior experience in BI. Since December 2021, I have been working on establishing a BI deployment in collaboration with a partner. My main focus is to create and enhance internal and external applications for app stores. Currently, my task primarily involves developing a new deployment strategy.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We built a BI system to provide clients with access to the data that we collect. They can access the data report and various reports by using Power BI.

It is built into the Azure cloud. You can't deploy it otherwise.

We have a product called ED Tracker, and we allow clients to subscribe to this product, and they use it through Power BI. It enables us to offer new services to clients and basically allows them to work on the data or report themselves, rather than sending them data with PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, etc. So, we work with our clients through this platform. They need to have the license. If they want to access the system, we just tell them that they need to get a license. The license is very cheap. It is $10 a month per user. It is not very expensive, and once they have the license, they can access our cloud solution.

Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly.

It is an evolving solution. So, it still has some rough edges. As compared to Tableau or QlikView, there are some things that you can't do when you want to. For example, giving specific access to some reports for users. You can get it up and running very fast, but some things are a bit trickier, and for some of the things, you need to actually write code. 

It is sort of a work in progress. They're catching up on the competition, but it still takes time. Other solutions are more mature, and they have been in the market much longer, but it is catching up. It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better.

There should be the ability to export to PowerPoint or PDF. It should be more efficient. It's rather clunky right now. Sometimes, the system is inconsistent in the way it does things. 

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is adequate in terms of speed and stability. It is very stable. Sometimes, it is a bit slow. It can be faster, but you need to subscribe and purchase additional packages or resources, and then it becomes more expensive.

We haven't scaled yet, but you have the ability to have a dedicated server on Azure with CPU. You can increase and have an SQL Server, so you can scale it.

As of now, we have around 10 to 12 users internally and externally. Some are internal, and some are external clients. We do have plans to increase the usage because we're trying to sell and market the product to other clients as well. So, we do have plans to increase the number of users. One of the benefits is that it doesn't matter if we have 10, 20, or 50 users. It doesn't inflict any costs on us because they go directly to the cloud. They don't come to us. It is very indirect, but we do plan to extend the usage of that system. We might also extend it internally.

Their technical support is absolutely magnificent. A week ago, we had an issue related to permissions, and we couldn't find out how to do that. My colleague contacted the support of Power BI. They not only answered us by mail; they also had a half an hour session with us on Teams to better understand what our issues were. They wanted us to send them the files. They reviewed them and told us that there were still some limitations, but they were working on them, and they will let us know.

We were stunned that someone from Microsoft is interested in what we're doing and someone is willing to go online and have a half an hour session with us so that we can explain what we're doing and what is our issue, and they can think about how to resolve it. We're a small client. We're not a big company. So, we were stunned by their support. Their support is amazing.

A few years ago, we've tested QlikView and Qlik Sense. Their deployment costs were rather high, so we decided to use Power BI.

It was very easy and straightforward. It was rather quick because you can launch it. It is very easy to publish. They give you direct access to their cloud. For small solutions or datasets like ours, the initial setup was a matter of days. We started with the desktop on-premise, and then we published it to the cloud. It was rather easy. It was a matter of days to a week or two.

We used our own team. Its deployment and maintenance are taken care of by a PM and a colleague of mine. It is very easy. You just press publish, and it's off to the cloud.

In terms of ROI, it is a 10 out of 10.

Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. 

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge.

We didn't evaluate other options because we have had some past experience with other solutions. We knew that QlikView might be good, but you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started if you want to do something. We knew the costs, and the entry cost was much higher. So, we decided to go with Power BI. It is also integrated with Office and Excel, so it's very easy to go along and do some of the things that you can do in Excel. It is very easy to transition between them.

If you are looking for a good BI solution for a small business that is very easy to deploy and not costly and that can use the cloud in terms of security, Power BI is probably the best solution in the market.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There are other solutions that might be better than this, but they're more costly. It is the cheapest BI solution in the market. It is not the best in terms of features, but it is the best in terms of value for money. For the volume of work that we have, there is absolutely no competition.

The data is captured by transaction processing systems, and even when the data is captured by a very sophisticated enterprise resource planning system, or ERP system, such as SAP. We'll find that that data is organized in a manner that is suited for the data updated. Therefore, when data has to be used for decision making, it has to be reoriented and organized in a manner that is suitable for data analysis and further for predictive analytics also. What we do is pull out data from multiple data sources, either on SAP or somewhere else.

There could be a certain budget or plan or target-related data on some other platform or on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The data is stored at different places. Some data could be on your internet platforms. Wherever it is, we pull out the data. Then we get that into the SQL server and we organize it in a manner that's suitable for further creation of dashboards and analytics applications, which can be used for better decision making.

The company has been able to make better decisions, due to the fact that, when we prepare business intelligence or data analytics applications, they are used by very similar decision-makers, as well as middle-level management decision-makers. From the same infrastructure, the data is used by even the report consumers. You can consider three layers of users, report consumers, mid-level use, as in, those who do interactive analysis of data, and decision-makers. Right at the top, those who would like to see the key performance indicators and use them for deciding a course of action can do so. All of our applications have been providing functionality for all these types of needs, including risk and compliance.

The solution offers many features, however, just the way in which that product is designed is quite useful for us. 

The way in which it can connect to multiple data sources is also very useful. The way in which data can be manipulated by using data analysis expressions has also been a good feature for us.

The solution is stable.

The solution is quite scalable. 

Our clients seem to be happy with the level of technical support they receive.

With our experience, the initial setup is straightforward.

Microsoft is often updating the solution adding new helpful features.

I'm not a product expert as such, however, I am aware that Microsoft comes out with a newer version, which is really downloadable and it's replaced every month. Therefore, the improvement is continuous. Since Microsoft provides a free downloadable desktop version of our BI. That desktop portion gets a new version which comes every month, we can replace the older version. 

Their ecosystem is quite good in terms of adding new features, in terms of adding custom visuals or adding many more interfaces or reporting features and more functionality within existing reporting and graphs. We don't have much to complain about except that they can always add many more features as they go.

Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution.

We've used the solution since its inception. We've used it for a very long time. We have been in this domain for the past 30 years.

The solution is quite stable. That's why it is right at the top, of Gartner's quadrant. We have deployed it with hundreds of users and it's withstood the test of time.

The solution is quite scalable. Of course, it requires data strategy just like any solution or any tool.

We tend to have 100 to 200 users at a minimum using the solution.

The solution is extensively deployed. We have plans to use it on an ongoing basis. They come out with new versions and new features every month, and this constant updating and iteration of the product have really been very helpful for us to provide more advanced solutions.

In terms of technical support, we don't really deal with it. Normally, our clients have a contract with Microsoft, however, my understanding is that their experience is good. 

We were using a CA tool and we have done work on Oracle. We have done work on many such platforms. However, since 2008 or 2009, we have been focusing on Microsoft as the total cost of ownership has been quite reasonable.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Our implementation strategy involved a business requirement phase where we sought out to understand exactly the expectations for a particular project. Then there is was a design phase where we decided on a data strategy of pulling data from multiple data switches. After that, there was a dashboard design phase, which includes wireframing of dashboards and then designing the dashboards according to those wireframes. Finally, we deploy and in that phase, we put in role level security, et cetera, and deploy it at an enterprise level. The entire process tasks three to four months in total, end-to-end.

We don't require much maintenance due to our maturity in design and development. We have been monitoring sites without having to add too many resources at our end as we have a robust design and maybe one person can handle four to five.

We do the implementation on our own. We have deep experience in this area, and we have developed two types of processes that we use to deploy our solutions. One is the data approach, where you know all best practices and methodologies are embedded into that thing. That framework gives a hundred percent assurance in terms of the success of that project. We have also developed a presentation layer framework whereby different subject areas are designed with very indicative dashboards and those dashboards can be quickly adapted to any data. That way, rather than starting from scratch, we use this framework which helps us to deploy our solution quite successfully. It's very fast also. We save around 50% to 55% of the time this way.

We don't deal directly with licensing. That said, certainly, we are aware in terms of what the Microsoft BI license costs. If it has to be applied on the cloud, then it costs around $10 per month per user. For a pro license and for a premium license it's around $20 per month per user. If it has to be applied on-premises then, depending on the course of your server, you have to buy a software assurance version of the database.

They don't charge for additional features. If you want a premium capacity to handle your work or job, then there is a separate license available. That is a premium license, which is available with the entire product managed by Microsoft and you can use lot more features, including Azure, et cetera.

We are Microsoft partners.

We have two deployment options. Some of our clients have deployed the cloud solution. Some are deployed on-premises.

Anybody who has worked on existing spreadsheet-based solutions can quickly adapt to Microsoft BI and the data visualization and interactive data features, they'll find it very exciting to use and very fast to adapt to it. It's a very effective solution.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I am a Power BI technical senior developer and consultant and I use Power BI to provide solutions for my clients.

Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features. When I say "missing features", I mean it in the sense that, even if you don't have a direct feature to do something, there are quite a few workarounds that you can figure out with DAX and M Query to make different situations work. I think these two are really the soul of the tool because they make a lot of impossible things possible.

There's a lot of room for improvement because Power BI is a new tool and hasn't really been in the market for that long, especially considering alternative tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau which have been around for more than a decade. Because Power BI is younger than those tools, I feel it hasn't reached a certain level of maturity that comes with time and it is lacking in quite a few areas which I'm hoping will be seen to in the future, given how it has been progressing so far with its new releases.

There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another.

When it comes to the feature's functionality, that's all fine, but, say, for instance, that you want to go ahead and turn off only the sub totals and not the grand totals. This might not be immediately possible, especially if you are working in a project where your technical solution is the backend site which the users don't quite care about. What they care about is what they see and interact with, and the visuals and formatting (and visual settings) at hand are what really matter to them.

This is where I think standardization really needs to come in. Basic stuff like being able to selectively turn on or off only the sub totals or grand totals. There should be certain formatting options which should be standard across every visual. What options you get here, you should also get over there, for example. These are simple things, but many a time it's something the end user takes very seriously. They generally do not care about what's happening in the background with regard to the calculations and everything else.

In essence, the standard visualizations should have features and options in common with one another, even when it comes to other visualization tools such as bar charts and line charts. These are all pretty basic visualization features, and giving them some standard way to be customized will make them as capable and competitive as what other tools allow you to do. Of course, you can do this if you add your own custom visuals from the library, but when it comes to basic default stuff, they should at least be deep enough in terms of standard customization to compete.

Right now it seems like they're trying to add a lot of features, but at the expense of losing out on the essence of the basics. The basics in Power BI should be equally as good as the basics in any other tool, and in this case I believe it to be a problem of adding more depth to certain features. The width, and variety, of features is not a problem for me. Whatever features are already available need to be deep enough to work with comfortably, and I feel this is where Microsoft needs to direct its focus.

I have been in the BI world for about six or seven years now and for the last few years it's all been Power BI for me.

Their support is a little slow in the sense that when I post a question to them, I don't get a response as fast as I'd like. Unless you're a premium user and you've got a dedicated technical support team — that's a different thing.

When it comes the usual Microsoft bugs, they generally don't come up with solutions too quickly. And many a time they don't even have a running solution; some bug fixes will probably only be part of the next release. Even then, however, the new releases are themselves often not terribly stable. Whenever you get a new feature, you almost know that this one's not going to work as perfectly as you would want it to. So you just have to wait for the next one, and that's what it is. It takes a little while to stabilize. This kind of thing, along with their support in general, can probably be sped up a little bit.

I am certified in MicroStrategy and have worked with it for several years. However, most of the business I am getting lately is all Power BI.

In my experience, everybody is switching from either MicroStrategy to Power BI or Tableau to Power BI. I'm hearing and seeing this going on in the market, for some very good reasons. I'm no longer working with MicroStrategy, but not because I don't like it. It's simply that I'm not getting enough work in that area.

Setup is very easy. In Power BI that's one thing you will find across the board when using it. It is very easy in terms of getting something done. Even complex things can be done in a pretty easy way and there's no complex challenge in it.

The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side.

That said, many times people are attracted by its affordable price tag, but then they see that it doesn't do everything they want and they conclude that that was the reason why it was so cheap. There's a problem with this kind of thinking, because even though it might not have everything, the price is still on the cheaper side compared to other analysis products like MicroStrategy. The complete suite of features from MicroStrategy is very costly, but at the same time there's no doubt that it can achieve a lot.

What you get with Power BI is that you start to find that even simple stuff requires a lot of gymnastics to achieve because there's no in-built, straightforward feature for it and you need to come up with a workaround. There are a few too many workarounds needed for my comfort, but otherwise it's a very good tool and it's one of my favorites. The pricing is competitive for a reason.

If you are looking for tabular reporting, then Power BI is not the tool for you. This isn't something that Microsoft speaks much about, and in my experience, if you want to do tabular reporting then there first has to be something in Power BI which can actually take loads of data and print it out on visuals in a tabular way, which is currently lacking. Power BI is really designed for analytical dashboarding and that's what it does best. For tabular reporting, on the other hand, it's better to just get the data exported out into Excel and do the rest there.

I would rate Microsoft PowerBI a seven out of ten.

There were two systems that the client was looking at creating some BI visualizations for. There was the system called ICE, which is a system that takes in automated calls, for service calls. They go into voicemail, however, if there's not an agent to take the call, it'll track statistics like how long a client was on hold, if an agent actually took the call, if the person hung up, et cetera. There are all of these different statuses and it would take all of those statistics. The product was used primarily to take that data in that case.

The other system was an ITSM system, which was the ticketing system. It would

it was my first time using Power BI, I can say that it was fairly easy to learn, especially if you already know BI-type tools. But the one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features, I think they were stronger on the Tableau side. But the data preparation features, I much preferred the Power BI with the Power Query type features, at least for the datasets that we were working with. They were helpful in preparing the data.

 combine those two data sets and reduce a merged analytical set of reports to just show when the call volumes were and what the performance rate was and the nature of the calls and things like that.

As it was my first time using Power BI, I can say that it was fairly easy to learn, especially if you already know BI-type tools. 

The data preparation features were great. I much preferred the Power BI with the Power Query type features - at least for the datasets that we were working with. They were helpful in preparing the data.

The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side.

There are two areas where the solution can be enhanced. One is natural language, where you can have third parties, however, it would be nice to have it built-in within Power BI, where a graph could be automatically explained in whatever language so that somebody can just kind of read through and have the graphic as an extra for exploring. That's something that I was looking at.

The other is the explained data, which is more of a lineage-type feature. My understanding is Tableau has that feature and Power BI doesn't. I was looking at a graph of comparisons and I noticed Tableau had this explained data feature, which gives, some lineage where data has come from, and Power BI doesn't have that. Or, if it does, it's not as well developed as Tableau.

I used the solution a few months ago. I'm semi-retired, however, I did have a two-month contract and did some work with it. On the project, I did work a lot with Tableau, however, I also used Power BI, and would like to continue to use it more. 

It was a short project on the Power BI side. I didn't really identify any glitches. Certainly, over time things might've come out, however, I enjoy doing experimenting and playing around with things. The one definite thing that I noticed, as I do art with Tableau, is some really neat art stuff, so I tried to replicate that with Power BI and the quality just wasn't there.

With ITSM, there's a lot of data that they collect on that side. That could be an issue, scalability. It wasn't moved to production yet. I basically produced a report as there were some issues with the ICE data, the voicemail system, and data collection. They had some issues that they had to solve. However, they were collecting data on a daily basis. You get thousands and thousands of calls on a daily basis. It depends on how they want to store that data historically. There may be some performance issues and scalability issues, however, for me, I can't really address that, as I didn't see that side. There's always a potential for trouble.

It was a really short project for me. I was really there just to analyze those two data sources and produce a report for them, with some examples, using Power BI. I was able to do that without getting tech support involved.

I've used other solutions, such as Tableau and Power Query. Tableau from a graphical point of view is much better than Power BI, however, from a data manipulation standpoint and things like that, I prefer Power BI and Power Query to prep the data.

Tableau got bought out by Salesforce, which is a cloud-based company, so they're all going to push everything to the cloud. I'm sure they'll incorporate all these new features.

I downloaded the solution from their website. 

The server side was already set up, therefore, I don't know much about the initial setup process. As a contractor, I came in just on the development side, which was just downloading the Power BI tool as a client. It was fairly easy. That's the nice thing is it's easy to set up. It is similar to Tableau, in that Tableau is fairly easy to set up. It is all built towards this whole idea of self-service.

I'm just a customer.

As I downloaded the solution right off the website, I assume it was the latest version. I don't know the version number off-hand. 

I would do the development on-pre

There were two systems that they were looking at creating some BI visualizations for. So there was the system called ICE, which is a system that takes in automated calls, for service calls. And so goes into voicemail, but if there's not an agent to take the call, it'll track statistics like how long you were on hold, if an agent actually took your call, if you hung up. All of these different statuses would take all of those statistics. And so it was to take that data.

And the other system was the ITSM system, which is the ticketing system. And kind of combine those two data sets and reduce a merged analytical set of reports to just show when were the call volumes were, and what was the performance rate, and the nature of the calls and things like that.

It's easy to set up, however, regarding scalability and high-end analytical features, Tableau is still better on that. It's always important to keep up, as technology's changing all the time. They're always adding new features. There are no negatives in exploring these tools. In the end, you just want some visualizations that help you make decisions. Both Tableau and Power BI tools are great for that. However, if you want advanced stuff, then it's just about experimenting and seeing what will help you solve your problems.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are using it for financial analytics and reporting. We are using it to keep a track of projects and being able to degrade the projects. We are also using it for contract closeout.

My technical guy has been using the first version of it since it came out, but we are getting ready to upgrade to the newer version. It comes along in a bundle with the 365 Enterprise version.

It is on the cloud. We're probably going to run a hybrid because we want to be able to move around. If anything happens or if needed, we can move from platform to platform.

We can see things from a bird's eye view. We can do predictive analytics. I can tell who's capable, who's doing what, when and how much money they're spending, and how fast they're burning. So, it gives us a bird's eye view over the financials and the money. It basically gives us the ability to collaborate and keep track of everything that's going on in an organization. We were able to bring all the collaboration and tasks right into Power BI.

It is easy to use. It has got a desktop where people can develop their own dashboards. Basically, we have figured out how to connect finance contracts and all programs for the government agency. So, they can see everything in a dashboard. So, it is very easy to use from a technical standpoint of view. We publish a report every morning for the government, and we got all the data into one place. The data can be refreshed. We are using the API to connect to various systems, such as the financial system, contract writing system, and workflow. We are able to bring things from NIPA, which is their budget and where they keep all their money. There are a lot of features, but the most important thing is it is very easy to use. It is not like Tableau. With Tableau, you've almost got to be a rocket scientist.

On the user side, it is quite simple. If you know how to run a pivot table, and then you can do almost anything. All the data is right there in the database. So, if you understand pivot tables and know how they are run, and you know the reports that you are looking for, then everything becomes very easy to run in your organization.

Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop.

We've been using Microsoft BI for about four and a half years.

Its stability is pretty good. It is pretty stable.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 in terms of scalability. Currently, we are running a pilot. We're doing a pilot for army headquarters. They dictate what happens and what they use. Currently, there are 10 users, but I'm looking to go up to at least a hundred. 

We got an architect and an assistant administrator. We got a staff of three and a half people because people take vacations or sick leaves. The good part about it is that these people can work from anywhere.

We are a Microsoft reseller. We have partnered with Microsoft. We have developed a relationship with their technical folks over the years. So, we kind of go directly to them. My partner came from Microsoft, so he has a very good relationship with a few technical folks. So, we, kind of, have some special privileges that a couple of other vendors don't have.

As a matter of fact, we had built a tool, but it took so long to get it vetted and get it through to ATOs. That's when we decided to convert to Microsoft Power BI. It has already been vetted and approved in the army environment. It is an approved government site for cloud services. We were looking for the easiest path, and that's why we worked with Microsoft BI. They've already been embedded into the government. It is bundled with Office 365.

If my technical person had to rate it, he would say very easy. All we need is to have the software.

It was done in-house.

They are charging us by users in storage, and there is a license fee. My financial people handle all that. The client has already worked out a contract with Microsoft, and basically, we're getting government prices.

The backend is the most important part. We understand its backend. We implemented the on-time system for an airport. We don't find its modeling complicated. We set up the back offices and get all the modeling done and everything connected. The customer doesn't even see that. They only see the part where they're running their reports and doing the analytics or whatever they need to do. We give them all the information at their fingertips.

Everybody is going to Business Analytics. A lot of people don't understand the difference between analytics and coding, but that's something for me to teach and educate them on.

I would advise doing your testing and environment setup. You should evaluate your product very well and figure out what platform your organization is running on. You should be careful and look at how well it integrates with other products. If you're not in a Microsoft environment, it is going to be quite difficult. Oracle and Microsoft are competitive. So, you go with one or the other. The reason why I like Microsoft is that they integrate with all applications. Microsoft controls 99% of the desktops.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of 10.