Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We are using this solution to create dashboards and reports for business analytics. We are in the early stages of testing and we have yet to determine if we are going to continue using the solution. We have to fully evaluate the solution first.

The use of the dashboards with analytics has helped our organization.

The most valuable features are the easy creation of reports, dashboards, and the ability to perform analysis. It is important for us to create reports because we have some operations during certain hours and we can use this tool to track the information. Additionally, it is a benefit they are adding more features all the time, such as machine learning.

I have been using this solution within the past 12 months.

The solution is stable.

I never needed to use technical support. However, they have a good online community where I found documentation, a lot of general information, and tutorial videos on YouTube and Google.

The installation is simple.

The price for this solution is reasonable. However, there is an additional cost if you want to publish the dashboard privately.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

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.

MS SQL & SQL Server Analysis Services.

We provide BI solutions to the users at every level in order to monitor business. We can deploy DWH, cubes and reports from scratch within weeks of implementation.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly, requires development. Power BI will surely provide a huge boost to MS BI in terms of self-service BI. Then again, SSRS developers are plenty, thus not so expensive.

Ten-plus years.

Stability issues are due to bad hardware sizing, bad forecast of volumes, or bad data modeling.

Only when data models were faulty of when the infrastructure was not compliant to MS recommendations.

Tech support from Microsoft, when needed, is as efficient as can be.

Worked in different technical environments but never saw a switch from MS BI.

Developers and architects are easily available for this technology.

MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution.

Watch your data model, use data marts when possible, set your archiving/purge policy from the beginning, size your hardware well (unless on cloud).

• It's a user-friendly tool
• Very stable
• It always helps us to achieve organizational goals

It's been stable for over eight years, and all the latest products/versions have backwards compatibility, or an upgrade facility. It has helped to fetch many projects, and to deliver them on time, as well as helping to resolve complex business challenges. The product has continual updates so we can stay on top of the market.

• Data warehousing manager is not available, which can be introduced
• Reporting or SharePoint needs a lot of learning so you can build reports

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Microsoft has a great level of customer service.

There are great public forums available for tech support.

• Straightforward - installation, development, deployment, and maintenance
• Little complex - Learning the tool

We did it in-house.

I am not sure how to calculate this. The solution significantly improved BI and reporting capabilities. Without this solution, the business can’t think of successful operations.

It is not costly when compared with other competitor products. This is a rock solid solution for any BI organization.

We didn't do much evaluation as our dev teams experience is with Microsoft BI.

This product is hassle free to utilize for your BI environment.

Data Integration and Cleansing & Warehousing are the most valuable

End-user tools such as Excel is not good enough for all business scenarios.

8 years

There are some issues with 2005/2008 releases, but most of them were fixed starting with 2012 release

Sometimes in the starting few months of every new release.

There are some problems with huge chunks of data. Some of these can be addressed with appropriate hardware appliances and a lot of tweaking.

I do work on projects to switch clients to MS BI usually due to its attractive pricing and tight integration with MS Office suite. Also the learning curve for users is flattened due to their fluency with Excel.

MS products are great but security is always a concern to make the whole ecosystem work smoothly. The latest BI suite is tightly integrated with SharePoint which is great; but the set-up process and deployment is still painful.

Have knowledgeable people to make the right choices for you.

I am a consultant for a big company. We deal with energy companies, petroleum, sales companies and we deal with everything from financials to operations. We deal with market strategy and we provide consultancy services - I'm a part owner of the company. 

I like the CS, administration, most of the features are good as well as the technology.

I think creating dashboards could be easier. Compared to other solutions, the cost of the license is expensive and that could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for over 20 years. 

The stability is excellent. 

The scalability is excellent, all our professional consultants use it. Where we deploy in the banking sector, they can have 1,000 licensed users; in smaller companies there can be 50 users. 

Technical support is quite good, but I'd like to see a quicker response time. 

Deployment time depends on the company, it can take up to two months. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

I use Microsoft BI for my own projects that are related to integrating with Excel datasets. I use the visualization and graphing functions, and I have tried using the Python integration.

The most valuable feature is integration with Python.

The integration with third-party products could be more stable.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately one month.

Microsoft BI could be a little more stable.

We have approximately 10 users. I don't expect that we will expand our usage or continue using this product.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

There is no complexity in the initial setup. It takes approximately 15 minutes to deploy.

There are twenty people in the team that handles the deployment and maintenance of our solutions.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Power BI is a great tool for analytics. It is useful if you have a requirement to create a dashboard with self-service capability, along with KPIs, and you want to drill down to the data details.

I have tried SSRS and later moved to Power BI. SSRS requires every analytical feature to be implemented separately. However, with the appropriate granularity of data, you can drill down and drill up easily which gives you a different view of the dashboards. Now with having on-premises availability, it makes this tool even more powerful.

If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful.

The most valuable features are:

• Self service
• Inbuilt analytics
• Custom visualization
• Printing of dashboard helps a lot
• Dashboard scheduling
  
• Easy collaboration with other users on Power BI
• Learning curve for this tool is small
• Dashboard refresh rate can be configured
• Power BI works both on-premises and cloud

Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS. 

I would like to see built-in Git support, incremental loading of data, and a machine learning model for predictive analysis.

Custom colouring from the dashboard itself would be helpful.

I have been using Microsoft BI, SSRS, and Power BI for four years.