Microsoft Power BI Reviews

By building the multi-dimensional database with Analysis Services, we were able to improve the performance of our reporting system. Now, our end-users can see the data stories quickly through Excel, Power BI tools, etc.

It provides a full platform for our BI solution (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on).

• Monitoring features: I need Microsoft to provide a set of tools to help me monitor Microsoft's products. For example, when I need to investigate the performance issues of SSIS packages, I do not have a tool, instead I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance.
• SSIS Connectors: Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way, which they are doing very well in Power BI, and that we can connect and process data from JSON, SOAP, SAP, Salesforce, and so on.

No.

No.

It is not excellent, but enough to resolve our issues.

It is quite easy to setup.

There are a lot of factors which we analyze and consider before we choose any product. In case we need a solution that we can develop, deploy quickly, and adapt to our business changes, Microsoft is the best candidate.

Microsoft offers us a full platform, which we use to develop and deploy our BI solution quickly and easily. It also provides both of these infrastructure for use: On-Premise and Azure Cloud. They are very flexible.

The self-service part.

We are a consultancy firm, helping our clients with billing and business intelligence solutions. We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way.

The navigation. The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit. It's user friendly, but you would like to have it even more user friendly.

When you do selections in one tab in Report, and then you move to the next tab, then you have to do your selections again. So one tab as a global, central selection possibility would help.

If you compare to QlikView, there's still a lot of functionality that QlikView has that Power BI doesn't. For most companies, Power BI is good enough, especially if you consider the price tag it's an easy choice. But it still has some catching up to do to match the functionality in QlikView.

Eight to 10 months.

It feels very stable. A bit slow sometimes when you change stuff and you want to refresh data and apply it to the data model in your queries. You want to apply that to your reports and dashboards and it can be a bit slow sometimes.

We don't have that experience yet. We still don't know how it is to deploy it in larger scales. So, that's my concern, but I haven't seen the scalability issues at our clients.

No, not yet. There are a lot of self-training videos and such out there on the internet and on the Microsoft websites.

QlikView and Qlik Sense. We felt demand in the market for Microsoft Power BI. Also, within my company we are selling services around Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Power BI hooks very well into the other Microsoft products.

It was pretty straightforward. Not much to set up. Cloud service and desktop client that you need to download and install, but if you have worked with other similar tools then you and know about that.

We are constantly looking for what is hot in the market and this has really come up as a rising star on the BI market, so it was not so much of a question about it at all. Quite obvious.

There are some limitations in regards to the navigation part.

SSRS and the Tabular server/Vertipaq engine/DAX are probably the two most valuable components, leaving out SQL Server (and Azure versions of it, including the Azure warehouse and big data technologies). SSRS's display functionality is resoundingly flexible, and by comparison to other vendors, relatively easy to learn. SSAS Tabular performs very well with modest effort in design, and the ability to perform complex business modeling through DAX calculations stands out in a crowd.

Microsoft BI really entails a whole catalog of products. The relative ease with which these products work together is where the primary value comes into play. When you buy SQL Server Enterprise, you automatically have access to SSAS, which can handle Tabular or multidimensional cubes and data mining, SSIS offering a pretty comprehensive integration toolset, SSRS, covering just about any paginated and subscription-based reporting, and of course all of the in-built features of SQL Server, the individual useful features of which there are too many to spout out here. Each of these components work well enough in isolation, or as part of a larger ecosystem with other vendors, but together are a well-integrated machine that can handle end-to-end needs on the entire lifecycle of data. Being one of the more popular vendors, Microsoft products are also the first compatibility for other vendors' products. The breadth of products do a fine job at enabling the delivery of data and insights to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. Doing so efficiently/quickly is where a huge amount of value comes in. Many other enterprise vendors are capable, but are either slower to execute, more work to maintain, cost much more to find talent and skills for, or some combination of all of the above.

No product is perfect, and the Microsoft stack is no exception. The first things that come to mind are Microsoft's recent shift in strategy to focus on cloud first. While this makes sense for them, it leaves the on-premise products lagging in support and new features, while the vast majority of users (mid to large corporations) are still using on-premise solutions and/or are cloud-averse. For example, the announcement that the pricing model for Power BI would change, simultaneously rolling out both Power BI Premium and Power BI Report Server created a great deal of confusion for people who were very enthusiastic about the product. The failures to address concerns with the speed and nature of the changes were felt by users across the spectrum, and it was a situation created by their cloud-first strategy. Similarly, if you look at the tried and true on-premise options for data processing, interfacing with emerging technologies, especially big data technologies, lags behind. This is considerably less true for Azure users, but that is specifically a cloud offering, which again, many corporate entities are not yet ready to embrace.

It's easy to think of BI as only the visualization aspect of data, and that point of contact between users and data is absolutely where the rubber meets the road in BI. In reality, there are a whole stack of tools and concepts behind the visualization that enable that interaction - from security, data governance, integration, performance, network and infrastructure, and automation... there are many facets to BI as a system. The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack. The PowerBI visualization experience is underwhelming in almost every way compared to many alternatives.

Another difficulty is navigating the many products within the suite. There are many components, and each component has many versions. Dealing with feature and compatibility issues with so many versions of so many products can be very frustrating at times. Microsoft does not do itself any favors on this front with the way they name their products. "PowerBI", for example, could be in reference to the desktop design tool, a cloud-based service for publishing and administering data models (which comes with three distinctively different pricing models, the features of which are different and not interchangable), or an on-premise server solution replacing SSRS. You'll make yourself dizzy looking at the Azure services offered. The good news is the sky's the limit, the bad news is you'll have to navigate some pretty cloudy areas to make heads or tales of what to actually use.

Four years, using largely SQL Server 2012 and related versions/components.

In general, no. Most stability issues encountered have been more related to network or infrastructure, and not the products being used.

As with any system, good design is paramount. I have certainly run into times when performance suffers, or changes and enhancements are slow and expensive. In every case, redesign has solved the issues. As hardware improves, and the many options (especially in the Azure and big data space) continue to evolve, designing for scale has become easier and easier. One of the difficulties that naturally occurs in this ecosystem is simply knowing how to design with so many options that can potentially do the same or similar task.

I have experienced mixed results on this front. We have had some very available and supportive account reps at times, and other times not so much. My biggest complaint would have to be that the disorganization from Microsoft's side makes the results on this front inconsistent.

Depends on which components we are talking about. For reference, however, I don't think there is a single Microsoft component that was as painful as any given Oracle component to work with.

Do your homework when deciding what components to leverage. The worst thing you can do is try to use them all. The gamut of products under the Microsoft BI banner enables every form of BI - choose the ones that serve your specific purposes, and leave the rest on the table until a new need arises.

Standardized solution that comes with data warehouse and BI cubes straight out of the box for deployment for both Dynamics NAV and AX products. Enhanced wizard allowing for customization of BI Solution without having to go through SQL scripts to generate additional measures and dimensions.

It reduces the time needed to generate reporting for an organization, allowing management to have an overview of how the company performs. Afterwards, it allows the company to formulate strategies to improve itself.

To add-in the functionality of AI into the reporting, so this can improve further on the product as it is currently. The BI reporting still relies on historical transactions.

Five years.

No. It works on all versions of NAV and AX.

The current deployment of the solution is up to 2TB. Do note that it still is not to the “Big Data” level.

We have our own technical team who supports the BI solution. We usually solve 95% of the issues encountered. For those that can’t be resolved, it is escalated to our HQ.

It is fairly straightforward. As long as there is a connection to the server which houses the NAV/AX database and all the data warehouse, since bi cubes are generated from the BI solution, without any need for user intervention.

For the first project, we will advise using consultants to assist on the implementation, so the dos and don’ts of the solution can be known in the first instance without having to trial and error the solution.

Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View & SQL Server Data Tools comprising of (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS).

Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse.

SSRS improved our report delivery timings and the Power BI feature empowered the data users.

Power View improved the visualization of our reporting and dashboards.

SSMS & SSRS.

For over five years.

Yes.

Yes, SSRS reporting portal cannot run on tablets, iPads and all other mobile devices. But SQL 2016 has been shipped with this capability.

Microsoft has a lot of products, hence some products are given little attention and VS is one of them, so I would say their technical support for the BI suite is average.

No.

The initial setup was fairly simple and straight forward, I must say.

To others, I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill.

Yes, Tableau.

For users intending to use the product in exclusively Microsoft environment, this product will meet most of your requirement if not all.

If there is a need for integration with other vendors’ products precautionary measures must be taken.

SQL 2016 is bringing and offering that support for mobile BI, so it would be great to give it a try.

If you are comfortable with MS Excel spreadsheets, then Power BI is your thing as it has the same look and feel of Excel, actually, it is embedded in Excel.

With the out-of-the-box Data Platform and Business Intelligence ecosystem, you get the entire platform with a single license.

Previously, I was working for a retail company and when I got there, there weren't any analytics implemented yet.

So, what I did was, firstly, I implemented an EDW solution so as to gather all the possible data in a single repository.

After that, I developed a self-service model so the company could take advantage of their ad hoc analysis.

Then, I implemented some standard reports to understand some basic indicators, together with the delivery subscriptions so that all the organization's levels could receive this valuable information, i.e., for more than 500 users.

Lastly, I connected this platform to the cloud (Power BI) together with a top BI solution (QlikView) so as to take full advantage of the second data insights' step journey.

The Windows OS dependency needs to improve. There are some bugs with the new features that have released.

It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency.

I have used this solution for 10 years and still counting.

There were no stability issues.

Technical support is very good.

I was using Oracle before, we switched to Microsoft because Oracle is very expensive for the benefits that they offer.

The setup was easy, actually, a single instance installation can be installed by clicking next and next. Maybe a cluster installation could be a little more complex, but it is still easy.

This is one of the best out-of-the-box solutions on the market. Microsoft has to improve their Data Governance solution, but for a data platform and BI solution, it is very good.

We evaluated products such as Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres.

It is very straightforward. Maybe you won't like the Windows OS dependency, but, in the 2017 version, you can install the engine on Linux.

Microsoft BI Stack's best features are as follows:

SSRS – Self-service reporting and powerful subscription service

PowerBI – Self-service BI

MDS – Master data management

SSAS – OLAP Cube

Microsoft BI Stack improved the way our clients in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution) and the agro industrial sectors manage their financial reporting and board pack preparation, from one week to five minutes.

The following areas could be improved:

Publishing and sharing data using PowerBI.

People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training.

It's not always easy to speak directly with a MS Power BI expert.

You have to sign up to the Power BI service using an email address to share and view Power BI reports and dashboards, but Microsoft doesn't yet support personal (.cox, .gmail, et.) or government (.gov, .mil, etc.) email addresses.

I have been using the Microsoft BI Stack solution for over five years in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution), agro Industrial, and telecommunication sectors.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as 7/10.

I did not previously use a solution.

The initial setup of the Microsoft BI Stack environment is complex, has many moving parts, and you need to know what you want for outputs to make effective use of it.

All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.

• QlikView
• Dundas

If you want to dazzle your audience and, at the same time, show meaningful insights, then this is the best tool.

It is good for highly formatted reports.

It helps to create the board report pack for financial reporting.

There is need to improve the graphical and dashboard reports; they must have tabs. This gap is usually compensated by QlikView.

I have used this solution for five years.

The product is stable. At times, it is slow when you use relational database as a data source, however it is fast when you use multidimensional cubes for high volume data.

It’s easy to integrate with the other Microsoft products. However, it is not as easy when connecting to other data sources like SAP ERP.

Technical support is good, I would give it an 8/10 rating.

As implementors or consultants, we use different tools.

The setup was straightforward.

It’s free if you have MS SQL database license. It comes together with SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and other tools.

We looked at other solutions, namely Crystal Reports and Oracle BI Publisher.

It’s cheaper to implement in terms of the licensing.

It works well, especially when implementing the whole stack of Microsoft BI solution including SSAS for data modeling and SSIS for ETL.