What I need are clear pricing details and a better understanding of the licensing policies. There might be opportunities for reporting or data analysis, perhaps even in the realm of simulation.

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MicroStrategy, for me, it's the visualization and user-friendliness that needs improvement. 

When compared to Power BI and Tableau, that's their sweet spot. They're super easy to pick up and use. Plus, they've got this cool association feature that updates when you change the timeframe. 

But with MicroStrategy, there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in integrating with developed mobile solutions using MicroStrategy. We struggled to deploy to iOS, and the Android adaptation was a big challenge for us. 

Everything that worked in iOS wouldn't work in Android, and videos and calendars were a whole other mess. So, user-friendliness for non-technical users and mobile performance on Android, particularly in India, where it's the dominant platform, those are my two big areas for improvement.

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There needs to be better visualization. It could be good to add new visualizations. Some of the visualizations are not there in MicroStrategy.

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- Many users have requested some specific graphing capability. More precisely, they would like the ability to configure a graph to be formatted and displayed identically to their excel documents. This is not always possible.

- The web developer tool for documents creation does not have all the features of the client version. When adding a derived attribute you can no longer edit the dashboard in the client version.

- There is no type of version control to check in or check out items. As a result, users create multiple backup folders and this produces multiple versions on the go.

-Different functions and options available with intelligent cubes created from MicroStrategy Web and MicroStrategy Desktop. Options such as scheduling and multi threading/partitioning.

- We would really benefit with more mapping functionality and compatibility with different types of mapping data types. One example is a Microsoft geography data type. Using the ESRI out of the box map plugin to draw lines between two co-ordinates and colour code them based on a metric value.

- Visual Insight /Self-serve - Simple ways for users to total/percent their data to a specific level. Translating a grid developed to a graph. In summary, make the self-serve area even more intuitive/easy to use.

-Exporting to PDF is a major pain point in the dashboarding/self-serve area. Alignment and colours are not maintained. This was allegedly fixed in version 10.6. We are starting the process to upgrade to 10.8 so I can not comment further.

-Users were not able to login with using LDAP. We had to add an environment variable to ignore LDAP referral chases. TN#15655 on MicroStrategy’s website.

-IIS Web Server would have a long initial load time. A variety of IIS settings were changed to increase performance. This is more of an IIS issue than probably a MicroStrategy issue, but I think it should still be noted since it’s above and beyond the basic installation setup instructions.

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For everything we do in our company, we consider MicroStrategy to be a workaround solution. For better customization in documents or dashboards, MicroStrategy can improve the features or settings available to make the development easier. I see that dossiers have been introduced in the solution to help the users do self-service in dashboards. I think the tool is not very straightforward for the developers to use the documents, so there is a lot of pending development work in the product. The aforementioned features can be improved in the product.

The online community page of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

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MicroStrategy needs to work on visualization and get closer to what Tableau or ThoughtSpot provides. They need to simplify the process involved when new objects are created. It currently requires updating the schema which takes time. In the next version, I'd like to see the inline processing of Python script that Tableau has and it would be great if they could introduce the Natural Language Processing feature that ThoughtSpot has implemented. 

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I would like to see the enterprise version available in a demo or as a trial version. It is the companies policy that we are not permitted to use any cloud solution in my company unless it is owned by the company, because we provide cloud solutions for others unless it is not provided. It comes down to enabling R&D for any individual.

It would be helpful to have an Enterprise version for non-enterprise organizations, for people like me who are trying to conduct test studies. As we are self-dependent study persons, my colleagues and I are required to do them. 

If I want to do something between myself and my colleagues, I have to go to my company's premises and use the companies resources. They allow us but it is frustrating because I can't do this if I'm doing something personal.

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The user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills.

What I think it could be very useful to have is quick measures, where it automatically brings you, let's say, three default calculations. It will be very useful and it will be very, very important maybe for the future for Power BI to have more additional quick measures there. Instead of the user having to think about, "okay, how am I going to calculate this measure? How I'm going to meet this measure?" If you already have a list of all the measures there in the quick measures, it'll make the life of the end-user much easier.

The solution is lacking some of the interactions that Tableau or Power BI offers. They have visualization points. They have good process cubes and a semantic layer on that point. However, I think they are missing the parts of user-friendliness. 

There needs to be better integration with other platforms. You can connect to several sources, but then you cannot integrate it into the suite that maybe Microsoft offers or other products offer. That said, everything depends on where your company wants to drive the business in the future. 

The end-user interaction is lacking. It's not as intuitive as Power BI is, or, in certain cases, Tableau is on virtualizations.

It's not interactive. There's a lot of filters on the page. 

The solution's reports are not very flexible.

Using this solution means that a company will need to find people with special skills. It's very difficult. When you're trying to find someone with a skill maybe in Tableau, Power BI, or Sapio, it's much easier because there are a lot of people like that in the market. Even if you're looking for a data scientist, it's very difficult to find a suitable candidate due to the fact that they have to have skills in MicroStrategy. If you don't have a resource that really understands the tool, then it will lose the purpose.

The solution should be re-designed so there is less coding and more drag and drop functionality.

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MSTR is already well structured when it comes to overall product architecture. Starting with version 10.x, MSTR has improved significantly in the self-service space in comparison to BI tools in the market. However, the Visual Insight tool can be further improved, especially in the areas of presentation and export features:

• They need to add more default visualizations, which are already available in RSD; for instance, histogram is a basic one that must exist in VI.
• Currently, export from VI is not working as expected. (Most visuals get converted to bar chart when exporting.)
• Though presentation mode is available, it would be nice to have an option for a more storytelling-like feature for better presentation of MSTR dashboards (similar to what is available in other BI tools).
• Pure design mode for VI: This would help troubleshoot abrupt errors VI sometimes throws as a result of underlying data/dataset changes.

These are some of key areas I feel need to be improved; however, there are many more suggestion on the community’s idea exchange.

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The solution's licensing could be improved because its cost is heavy on the pockets. MicroStrategy's visualization is a little on the lower side as compared to Power BI and Tableau.

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The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. 

There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation.

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There is room for improvement in customer support. 

Another area of improvement is stability of this solution. 

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In terms of what could be improved in MicroStrategy, it does not have enough variance of visualization for building dashboards, etc. and I need to buy a custom visualization from  different companies. It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts or if more visualization options will be added in future updates.

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I would like to see more integration. 

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Preparation, data loading, and data management application are challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics, or MMA deployment.

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It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. 

I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy.

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They could improve the Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager components. Enterprise Manager is another component that comes MicroStrategy that acts another project inside it. Though it is a great feature, it needs lot of polishing of the objects such as attributes, metrics and others. They could also improve the pre-built reports that they provide with the component.

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The design process of the mobile dashboard development. Now, MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design, which means we need to design a different layout according to the device's screen size. It costs us more effort if we want to support the mobile and tablet at the same time. It would be better if MicroStrategy supported a RESTful dashboard design pattern.

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There are ways to go in the areas of newer technologies (big data), better integration with other visualization tools. For instance, MicroStrategy does not provide real-time reporting and integration with other services (social media listening, for instance).

Transactional services should have a big overhaul in terms of delivery, tracking, rollback and documentation.

On the major improvements I would recommend – I would say last but not least – is a review of the UX of the whole backend, as it looks a lot like it’s from the early 2000s.

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There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage.

There are some challenges in our organization on how we store the data. However, if you are throwing something at it and expecting it to give you the one true answer, you got to do some homework before that.

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There are definitely some drawbacks. The biggest one is the complete lack of a community around MicroStrategy compared to other BI tools. This can be a huge problem from an IT department head's perspective. If a developer gets stuck on some task, they might spend hours or even days trying to solve a problem because there's no helpful information online. 

With tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker, you can easily find solutions and ask questions in forums or ChatGPT (OpenAI). It's almost impossible with MicroStrategy.

Another drawback is the lack of a talent pool. It's very difficult to find developers with MicroStrategy expertise. There are barely any online courses or tutorials available, and even searching for information can be frustrating. You won't find educational videos at the top of the search results; instead, you'll see stuff about Bitcoin investments. This lack of focus on development is a major downside. 

I've been quite disappointed with MicroStrategy's investments in recent years, with them prioritizing discounts over research and development.

So, in terms of functionality, MicroStrategy is alright. It's a solid BI tool and can handle most tasks you'd expect. The problem lies outside the tool itself. You need a strong community to learn from and keep up with the rapid development of BI tools. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy lacks that community support. You're either stuck figuring things out yourself or paying expensive fees to MicroStrategy consultants for help. This isn't the case with tools like Power BI or Tableau, where you can find experts readily available. In addition to other drawbacks, it's not cost-effective either. 

The on-premise version used to be the only option, which meant buying licenses for CPU units. While cloud migration with SkyLink in MicroStrategy Cloud makes scaling easier, it still requires initial setup and configuration. This button with Azure or AWS can take a couple of weeks, depending on your data sources and desired outcomes. Compared to other solutions where you can start quickly and iterate, MicroStrategy's approach might be seen as slower and less agile.

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The areas that have room for improvement in MicroStrategy are mainly related to building additional tools. Specifically, the embedding process has been a bit of a struggle. It's crucial to correctly populate the embedded components, especially considering my work in the banking environment. For instance, in the banking environment, there are branches in different regions. If you don't necessarily do it in the necessary SQL operations to populate the data, it becomes difficult to build an embedded React app or any other application. So, that's definitely an area for improvement.

So, we can list additional customization options as one of the improvement areas.

Additionally, I feel that the pricing is a little bit too expensive. That is the main reason why people are not using MicroStrategy in South Africa.

In the next release, I believe the additional customization options can help the product. Also, the pricing is too costly currently. Even that can be worked upon.

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They need to do a better job in its ability to allow end-users to produce their own reports, metrics, and self-service business intelligence.

MicroStrategy is a complex tool and you need to have a MicroStrategy architect. 

In the next release, I would like to see better visualization and more service audience or functionality.

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The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space.

They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that. 

What can they do embolden that system, to make it more intuitive? But also, to supply that support system so that they can get a higher level of reporting.

I know they're working on the telemetry initiative right now, and they have given us some reports in that system, the Enterprise Manager space, that really do help us look at those insights. But the biggest piece is that we can't get to them by ourselves, that's the problem. We don't see it by ourselves. We can't get to them by ourselves because there are association-joins and things that we don't understand, that are causing either cross-joins or any other crazy thing that you could think of. 

It's kind of like a trial and error deal, to see what's coming back. You look at the SQL, make sure it's a synched. It can be a little difficult to get in there and really figure things out.

In terms of features for a future release, I have a whole list somewhere. Row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out. 

I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before. 

They have a long road ahead of them to be able to accomplish it. But, being that we're in a very regulated industry, it is incredibly useful for manufacturing, for research and development, for those in Earth sciences, environmental sciences, those folks who have a lot of SPI, a lot of that data that they want to restrict users having access to, I think that's a selling point that they don't have right now. I think is going to take them out of the Earth sciences space as a true competitor. There are so many out there, and it's a space that they have an opportunity in, and that row-level of security was a big component of what we would do.

Then there's significant digits, which my client team will probably laugh about if I told you that, which gave us a lot of difficulty trying to get to a scientific way to look at decimals, but it's not straightforward and it's a pain. 

Then a few of those consolidations that I mentioned. 

Then, if they could beef up Enterprise Manager - if I could go to my client team and tell them this report has been run three times in the last three months by these three people and they say, "Well, those three people, what are they doing? Why are they running it? Get it out of our system. That's a waste of our time. It's a waste of our resources. It's taking up space." So if we can get to that next level in Enterprise Manager, I think that would be huge for us as well.

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If I were to pick a few areas with room for improvement, I would suggest the following:

• It would be nice to have more visualizations available for the user community right out the box instead of using the D3 plugin.
• It would be nice to have more features packed with the ESRI Map engine that is supported right out the box.
• MicroStrategy Operations Manager needs improvement from a visualization and stability perspective. (This is a new feature that was introduced in MicroStrategy 10.)

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Documentation and training: Though the basics of the platform are well documented and the in-house training offerings are the best software training classes I have ever attended, MicroStrategy falls a little short when it comes to some of the lesser-known/used features. For most, this will not cause a problem. But if your situation calls for the need to work with System Manager (a workflow application), for example, you'll be stuck searching thru Google and YouTube looking for information.

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Microstrategy works best against a star or snowflake schema. While in principle it can work with a more normalized data model, it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake. View full review »

Simplify dashboard design; it is very powerful, but sometimes it might be like using a cannon to kill a mosquito, depending on the situation. Perhaps it is simpler in the newer version.

From my experience, the Dahsboard design from Microstrategy v9i was
very powerful and flexible. It was a "pixel perfect" design, but comparing
with other reporting platforms like Tableau and Qlik and OBIEE it is more
complex. I believe it is very good, but it needs some technical expertise
(Power User) to be fully autonomous.

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https://www.itcentralstation.c...It would be great if MicroStrategy could incorporate into the Reporting Services dashboards the adaptive response that a Visual Insight dashboard has; being able to auto-adjust to the peripheral. When you create a Visual Insight dashboard, it would auto-adjust according to what the user is using to see the report; be that iPad, iPhone, or laptop.

The drawback to a Visual Insight dashboard is that it doesn’t come with as many reporting options as a Reporting Services dashboard. The drawback to a Reporting Services dashboard is, if you have users that span multiple ways they see the data – laptop, tablet, or phone – you have to create a specific dashboard for each.

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The administration tools (primarily System Manager, Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager) need a major overhaul. These tools are generally used by MicroStrategy administrators to monitor the usage and bottlenecks in the system.

Enterprise Manager is one tool which is provided out-of-the-box by MSTR. It's basically a pre-built MSTR project with reports/dashboards to monitor usage at the user, project and system levels. This is primarily useful to see which objects are used most frequently and which reports need to be modified for improved response times, etc. Setting up Enterprise Manager can be cumbersome and it's a buggy product. A ground-up redesign of the EM project would be ideal. It is still a very powerful tool for its current design.

System Manager is also buggy (various workflows don't work as expected, documentation is lacking, etc.).

Operations Manager was a tool that MSTR released a couple of versions ago, but it was riddled with issues (a lot of errors during setup mainly). I believe OM has been scrapped in newer releases, if I'm not mistaken.

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The developer is a long-ago obsolete tool. Its interface and functions should be completely redesigned. The fact is not only is the user interface far obsolete (for more than 10 years), it is also quite often repeating tasks like dragging because it handles the actions incorrectly (like moving objects from report objects are to a grid). Also, it does not work properly when the resolution is too high, and the integration architect tool is far from being bug free.

They are working on a new tool with codename Workstation so we will see.

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The 10.4 release is the biggest. I want to play with it to see what else I might want.

Dossier is the thing we were missing previously.

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The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern.

They could improve the maps they have on offer.

There needs to be more customization in the SQL engine.

The technical support on offer could be better.

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It is essential to have a good project partner in the beginning with MicroStrategy to be able to use their full potential. It is not a work tool that can be controlled in 2 days (triggers, attributes, derived metrics, transformations, etc) but I can assure you that there has not been any project that you have tried with MicroStrategy that has not been a success.

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We hope the new tools will make a huge difference, especially considering the new workstation. We would like to see features that were introduced for the Operations Manager that have been discontinued. We would like to see those features somehow integrated into the Desktop Workstation tool. 

From time to time, there is for a specific project and the focus is that the support is close to the HAPS. We had three HAPS and the fourth one is currently under construction. We would really like to see MicroStrategy have some support teams based more in Europe, because for now it seems that there is one person for the whole CE region. That is not exactly what we would like to see. We do know that MicroStrategy supports most places, either in the US or India, but those are different time zones, people, and cultures.

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There are learning curve issues due to organizational processes. Most of the time, there are processes in which the user is not sure how to implement the solution and what the other surrounding processes and frameworks that he needs to put in place.

MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting.

One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs. We would like to see it be more modular on the cloud, where people can look and scale different portions of the applications as they want. That will be a very interesting feature if MicroStrategy could do this.

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I hate the user interface. I hate having to sit down and put in every little thing. It is almost like we are always having a start from scratch in order to build something new or to build something similar to what was there before. It seems klutzy. 

We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time. 

We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do. We would like to have everybody with a phone, but again, this gets into what KPIs are you going to put on this phone that are going to be immediately accessible and actually usable because we have got thousands of them. If we put two or three on there, we do not have one RF engineer that is just going to use two or three. 

We are unable to boil everything down to a number, like Nike did with their shoes, your exercise, your workout routines, etc. We don't have that capability. We are really going to have to lead the realm of pretty charts and graphs and build an AI. 

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Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

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The pricing could be lower because it is costly. They could also provide some features that Tableau offers. Microsoft has development features regarding schema objects and some integrations.

Tableau is more user-friendly, and MicroStrategy could improve specific visualizations, short card metrics, graphs and functionalities. In addition, it would be good to have year-to-year comparisons using transformations.

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Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better.

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They have so much stuff in there that I don't know what else they can put in there, unless they can get somebody to be able to talk in there and tell it to build a report. 

From the standpoint of a partner and what I do as a job, there is nothing that I can see. Maybe from the customer's standpoint, because they are getting into something new.

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There are features which we are not using as far as some mapping and geography things which we could be using more broadly. That is in the current capabilities. 

I also went to a class on some statistic stuff, R, and all that integration that I think we would like to use. As far as additional things that are not currently a part of the capabilities, I am not sure, because I do not know all the capabilities yet. 

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There are a number of different applications bundled together and delivered under an umbrella product. It needs to be easier to determine which application controls which features and functionality.

I need to point out is that our company is a MicroStrategy OEM partner. We use the MicroStrategy products to build a BI solution for our own retail clients. 

With our EPM solution, we offer different user tiers to our customers, allowing them to acquire minimal functionality for Store Managers.

Each tier includes a particular set of MSTR applications. The Store Manager tier was created so that a single report could be run, but the output for each Store Manager would be limited to that store’s data.

This worked great on grid reports, but when our customer wanted to run dashboards and post them on a server instead of emailing them, it didn’t work. 

After casting about, we learned that we had to add a Report Services license for each Store Manager in order to support the posting of docs and dashboards to a server folder and distribute emails with links. That was a financial hit and it was not what we understood our clients would be able to do with the licensing they were getting.

This particular example actually got resolved when MSTR repackaged their solutions. This included many services in the server umbrella.

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Compared to other BI tools in the market, the development time for dashboards, reports, and scorecards for this tool is high.

It has developer and web components that are that the other has. It becomes difficult for a developer to switch between them for development.

Many BI tools enable you to develop a dashboard once, and then view it on various devices, such as web, mobile, and iPad. MicroStrategy dashboards are not auto-sized based on the device. A separate dashboard has to be developed for each device.

For every release, there are new features with new bugs equal to them. The vendor has to come up with quarterly releases, which is good; but the applications in a production environment are unstable because of the frequent upgrades being done.

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Simplified development tools.

Removing Flash from web interfaces

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More visualizations out-of-the-box. That would be my top priority. For example, the cool things that you see in 3D visualizations, if those could be made. If some of those things could be made available in MicroStrategy, that would be great. 

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The In-Memory Capability (cubes) needs a lot of improvement. They have tried a couple of new things in version 10.x, but it has stability issues.

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The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

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Web interface has to be more quick-response and user friendly. There is a desktop application that is still used. Creation of a report with complicated structure (documents) is not easy.

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MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support.

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• Tighter mapping integration.
• More Writeback capabilities that would allow our IT department not to be worried about the wild, Wild West of Writeback.

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Maybe a feature where migrations are easier. When you migrate from certain environments, it could probably be a little cleaner. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat clunky when you migrate from one environment, say a development to a test or production environment. 

Also, having some use cases from MicroStrategy that talk more about self-service, what self-service is and the applicability of self-service to different types of use cases and different types of personas in the businesses.

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I would like to see some enhancements in distribution services and the way reports are delivered currently. It is mostly static reports. We want to be able to do dynamic subscriptions and all that stuff in distribution services.

They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services. Then, they need to improve on having more professional, well-equipped premium support.

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It has two versions: web and desktop. Some changes can be done with the web tools and some can be done with the desktop tool. Reconciling the two tools to make all functionality available in all tools would be a great improvement.

The graphs available for the new dashboard of version 10 are weak. You can include all the 3D graphs that you find, but you have to find them and include them or develop them yourself. By default, you should have at least the same possibilities for the graph so that you can add in a document. For the moment, I still use the document because I did not find a line graph that can use multiple metrics and multiple categories.

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• Developer: Simplify BI modelling features to increase learning curve and user adoption.
• Data visualization: Improve and add visualizations and features to prepare BI apps. Reduce clicks and steps.

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Any product/feature request takes years to get, if at all. This really pulls the rating down overall.

For example, the MSTR prompt interface sucks, where users can enter details to get data. However, they do not seem to be too worried about modifying it. Selector preferences cannot be stored per user. Prompts can be saved per user but that interface sucks.

Also, multiple currencies are handled poorly even after introducing two or more datasets in a document.

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Creating a dashboard is a very tedious and manual process.

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Data access could be improved. MicroStrategy has a data import capability but it only works for data in a Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file. It would be helpful if one could point the data importer at a web site, or provide it a URL of a data source and have it import the data. View full review »

They should give proper industry-based tutorials so that one can learn it easily and implement it based on the requirements. They should give more MMP files so that we can import a whole project altogether and learn from that project. 

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Their basic tutorials could be improved; there are not enough. They should provide more tutorials and include some project files. 

They should create some project files. For example, if I see a project online, I can deploy that project and import it into my production. From there, I can learn how to create attributes from that project. 

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As part of this MicroStrategy World 2018 conference, we saw some of the VitaraCharts. If there are some advanced visualization features - maybe I'm not aware of them - but if there were a Vitara which could work on top of MicroStrategy, it would make sense for MicroStrategy to have that within their own library. So they should add more visualizations to the library.

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You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I actually want to bring it a level lower. I want to be able to create that union of data sets under the document level.

I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document. That's for complex documents, but I really would want that to be added to the solution.

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The analytic speed would probably be what I would look for in terms of improvement because we have super huge data, and if I do not build views on top of data, then reports render really slowly.

Higher management does not have time to run reports. They need somebody to give them the bottom line.

I prefer the capabilities of a single platform, but it does not always work. We are a huge company. Some areas do not use MicroStrategy, so you have to blend whatever systems they are using together to get the data points that you are looking for.

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• The default color pallets could be improved, and they are improving with each version.
• Simplification of the various configurations: The product offers a huge amount of options and configurations. It takes a while to get a good grasp of it all.

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In general, MicroStrategy objects within their metadata object model roll up to “project” as the highest level today. Given that most users equate a project to a BI “application”, if you need a Microstrategy object (e.g. Single panel objects, graphs/visualizations/reports/templates including depicted data, schema objects, templates, etc.) to be used across projects – you have to duplicate/build and maintain copies in each and every project using them. There could be several possibilities for handling this.

One option could be to create the concept of a “global” project in which all consistent, build-once-use-everywhere objects would be built and maintained and a corresponding option within each specific project to decide if/what “global” project objects should be inherited. To maintain the integrity of these global objects, they should not be modifiable within each specific project. Today, the only option to achieving this would be to have a single "mega-project" encompassing everything – this would not perform, would not be advisable, and would create dependencies that no organization could navigate successfully.

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As an architect and implementation specialist, I think it must improve component integration, troubleshooting and diagnostics.

The evaluation possibilities for developers are very bad. Obtaining the installation key and activation code is a complicated procedure; there are problems with the extension of the evaluation period. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a long time for customers to understand the benefits of the product and in this way, MSTR is less convenient for developers.

We had some problems with EM statistics ETL, Architect, and Operations Manager.

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MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people.

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We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better.

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Its price should be lower. In terms of features, what we have is quite encompassing right now.

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The flexibility to work with agile data model updates.

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The product could be improved by adding additional visualization.  Also, another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops. In addition, continued development of mobile reporting. 

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I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing. 

Also, there are minor features, that I've already logged with MicroStrategy, nothing major.

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Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem in general.

Needs more visual essence and connectors for the ecosystems, which would be easy to use. Easy to use in corporate and to implement in the ecosystem, and not too complex in terms of implementing and enabling, then that is what we will do.

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The visual insight tool can be improved further. When I tried with Tableau, it has a wide variety of graphs to generate quick and easy.

The graphical interpretations developed from the reports are not directly usable for dynamic analysis and formatting takes longer. the graphs do not indicate trends on their own. Whereas in Tableau, developing dashboards from the scratch is easy and super fast and dashboards look great without formatting.

But I heard MSTR version 10 has come up with many features; yet to try.

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Visual Insight, as I see, has improved a lot but it still lacks the analytics capability of other tools such as Tableau.

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The initial schema development takes some time. Without a robust schema, the tool will not function properly. The schema is the main engine which creates SQL effortlessly, but designing and maintaining the schema will take some time. The relationship between different attributes has to be maintained properly, as one incorrect relationship has the potential of affecting 100s of reports using that attribute. The schema can’t be maintained by end users and IT intervention is required.

There are two main development tools – Developer and Web. The two platforms are not in sync. Some options are not present in developer and some are present in web. The ones that are present in both are not located under same menus.

Dashboard development takes a long time.

The self-service BI part of the tool, Visual Insights, which is designed to provide the business the ability to create interactive dashboard using visualization, is not very great. Though Visual Insights has improved a lot in version 10.x, it still has a long way to go and is no way near competitors such as Tableau.

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Data blending needs more improvement; it should let us use all of the general options seamlessly.

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Data writeback, and on-the-fly predictive analysis results from R and Python.

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We already got some demos of the next release, so we are really excited about the Dossier. It is going to be really big. 

The other one that we are excited about is the collaboration aspect, where you can ping somebody on a dashboard and it sends them an email. Those are two things that we want, and those are two things that we are expecting. 

Our users tend to say the interface is a pain, which I can go either way. I find that once you use it for about a month, you are fine. But for some reason, some users are maybe not tech savvy or they are not familiar with applications like this. They have a steep learning curve, for whatever reason. Everything else is great. It has integrated very well into our data warehouse. I find it easy to build dashboards and create stuff. So, I am happy with it. It is just the end user has that pretty common steady complaint, but we are overcoming it. 

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• MicroStrategy Desktop: Personal analytical tool that helps users to do their analytical work using multiple sources of data. However, this tool needs to improve to add more analytical functions, and an easy solution to use third-party graphs and maps.
• Multi-level security: Currently, MicroStrategy provides multiple ways of access (Standard, Windows, Database, LDAP, etc.) the MicroStrategy tool (use either one of them), but not combined solutions.
• Big data solution: Currently, MicroStrategy is providing a very good big data solution for MicroStrategy Desktop but not an easy server-level solution.

* Reduced IT dependency. *

n Using template

o Users (Business Analyst) are using this canned report template for their reporting based on their info and save that report in their own folder. And they are using subscription to deliver that report to their stakeholder.

n Allowing user to create report from scratch. Train them what to use and what to not use. Once they familiar these then they don’t dependent on IT.

n Introducing the Dashboard; provide enough information in the dashboard. Once user started using those dashboard then they don’t dependent on IT.

Now most of the request from users like below;

- New metric (custom metric)

- New filters (custom filter)

- Complex reports where they can’t create by themselves.z

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The dashboard and reports are what they call pixel-perfect, which means you configure a fixed size for your report and align everything based on the fixed size. But now you have various devices with different screen sizes, and it would be smarter to have a flexible layout which will scale according your device.

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There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

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List of improvements that this product lacks:

• The ability to export and make the Intelligent Cubes shareable with other reporting tools.
• Expand on the capabilities of the Visual Insight dashboard creation wizard to include more complex document templates to make it more appealing for business users who need greater sophistication but less development time nor reliance to BI developers.

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HTML5 visuals, modern infographics

The web is full of very interesting data, and the number of web services providing datasets is increasing. I would like to see Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 to be able to attach external data sources. I'd like to have Support for JSON data. I hope HTML5 and JavaScript will be used extensively in next versions, to substitute the Flash based components.

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I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there.

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If I had no issues with the tool ever or if I did not have any problems when I upgraded, then I would probably give it a higher rating (a perfect 10). If the Enterprise Manager was a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it, I probably would give it a 10, but just those small things bring it down a little bit for me. However, it is a good tool.

Let us say that you have someone who comes in who does not have a strong programming background and they want to use Enterprise Manager to do some things. It is sort of the way the warehouse is set up, they might need the statistics warehouse when they first get in and they could be very turned off by the UI. Just the way some of the reports tailor themselves out-of-the-box, it does not really lend itself to be helpful. 

Then you have to customize, and when you start customizing, you bring in these attributes that sometimes do not even fit together. You may want to see something and how it gets done, then you are kind of stuck. That can make you leave the tool alone completely. Luckily for us, we have found ways to work with our consultant, and just really try to tackle it as much as possible. We have found ways to get around it.

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We have not invested nor are we planning to invest in MicroStrategy's mobile platform.

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This product needs to be ready to use at the enterprise level . As the market is growing and changing very fast, sometimes the development team does not have sufficient time to incorporate requirements within the given time frame. Thus, some solutions should be ready to use, i.e., the plug and play functionality for solutions at the enterprise level.

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Data discovery and self-service BI still needs to be simpler to end-users.

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Instead of using a lot of table joins within MSTR, we have had to rely on ETL for those same reports and then expose that view/report in MSTR. A couple of reasons for this are slowness when running the report inside MSTR and difficulty in setting up left joins when using multiple tables.

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Simplify the development environment and improve the visualizations.

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Probably this is not MSTR's fault but BI tool in general: sometimes trying to follow MSTR rules to get some formulas and data using MSTR techniques is harder (and less performant) than just prepare yet another DWH view collecting needed data (with needed inner or left outer joins and aggregations) and just model that new view in MSTR.

Also MSTR, as all these BI tools, generate automatic SQL code from the model defined in the architecture tool so sometimes you are getting weird results but are easily trackable (MSTR reports in all SQL generated code) to be fixed.

No ETL comes with the tool, either you have your own solution (MSTR SSIS, Informatica) to model your DWH or you connect MSTR to the datasource / transactional (which is not good)

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Visual Insight isn't as easy to use as the competitors.

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The Dossier feature needs improvement. In the developer, there are things that you able to do in a document or a report that you are not able to do in the Dossier.

Some of the features that are in the developer should be moved into the web application.

There are some filtering capabilities on dynamic dates that are not easy to use in the Dossier.

There are features such as transformations that are harder to achieve than in the Data Studio. This is an area that needs some improvements.

I would like to have Hyper Intelligence that is free to use without a special license.

For mobiles, it should be easier to achieve without having to have a special license. Not everyone can afford to have a license for mobile and a separate license for the developer and the web.

Also, I would like to see something more in data mining and predictive analysis. In order to be able to build them, you need to have special skills. It would be easier to achieve, with some plugins, or some tutorials in place to help.

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Since I'm a "mobile-dashboardy" guy, I would like to see more capabilities on the mobile side to bring it on par with apps that you see in the App Store, like Uber or Facebook. They've got all the bells and whistles - well, maybe not Facebook. The interface you can design in MicroStrategy is great, but I feel it needs to be refreshed, add a bit more functionality. As a developer in 2018, at least I have features that we're seeing in other apps in the App Store. I feel like we're a few years behind with our features, but still pretty excellent features.

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It's just very small technical things. Sometimes you can do something on attributes in documents RSDs, but then you can't do the same thing in Visual Insights or Dossier. Just being able to do everything across everything. Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents. So, it is expected that you should be able to do everything everywhere. 

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• There is room for improvement on the graphs. 
• They need to improve the web. 
• I know we are not competing against Tableau, but MicroStrategy needs to step up its game on the GUI side.

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The administration of automatic email reports is not very good. It has to be improved in a more easily and effective way, with the same license.
I would like to see data mining integrated.

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Business User friendly - which has been enhanced in Version 10.

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- Purchasing process: MicroStrategy is a very litigious organization. When we want to enter certain agreements, it's not uncommon for the request to go back and forth within legal for weeks. Some of this is our organization as well, though.
- Support: The support line used to be top notch, but now it seems as though the people manning that line are not very knowledgeable and can very rarely actually answer the question or solve the problem.

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Visualisation will improved in the next version.

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At the time we moved away from relying on it, the solution was really lagging as far as visualizations and ease of dashboard creation. It took much more of a MicroStrategy expert to design dashboards. It wasn't really something users could do on their own. The self-service component was really lacking.

The cost is pretty high. It was a little pricier than Tableau, for example.

The learning curve is quite steep. A company should consider a third-party service to help with implementation.

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Right now, MicroStrategy is on AWS by itself. Since we are retail - and AWS is Amazon, which is our competitor - if they would move onto different cloud environments, that would be awesome.

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It is too early to tell. We have some ideas regarding what we can do, because we have been using a different product all along. We will see as time passes as to what we could do before that we have trouble with MicroStrategy, but I do not think it will be a problem. 

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MicroStrategy seems to be very easy to use; user-friendly. Getting our data to work with it is where we are having issues.

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Development tools (developer and architect) need improvement.

Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking.

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I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

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Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

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Version control is still a major concern in MicroStrategy. I am aware that MSTR is working on it as an enhancement.

License cost is also on the heavier side. Perhaps the desktop version that launched recently, might help ease pressure on budget.

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The main thing that the company must improve is the support for their clients.

In Brazil I have seen many issues not being resolved for a long time, which makes the clients become impacient and disappointed.

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Transaction Services is a new field which allows users to have interaction with the databases. I am pretty sure MicroStrategy has improvements lined up in this section.

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The Geospatial and mapbox stuff that will be coming out should be really helpful. I know that is something that we have wanted: the map. That is coming, so it is good.

There are areas for improvement. Training would be an area that they could improve upon, but otherwise it is a pretty good tool. 

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If they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help.

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Something I would be interested in is more visualizations, because right now we use SDK to create some. If there were more out-of-the-box options, we would be happy with that.

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It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it.

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There are limited features available for the overall enterprise performance management and analysis. There isn't a proper mechanism to define proper KPIs, collaboration or analysis of numeric data separately.

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We need to act in advance of situations. I would like to be able to:

• Gather information about how long the partner will take to bring us a product.
• Find out what our real consumption average will be against our supply for that item

This information would help us decide if we should wait until we reach the resupply point or if we should start the process immediately.

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I think that there are some bugs regarding the design, and some features are a little hidden from the developer. Developers need to do a lot of research and consult a lot of manuals just to find that the solution for their problem was in a check-box within the configurations of the tool or project.

Update: Never tried the MicroStrategy 10, only installed it, so the improvement may already been answered in a lot of features.

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Data dictionary import would be great.

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I would like to see a single standalone application to control everything from the administration perspective, and also to develop new applications.

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The following are areas for improvement:

• Self reporting
• Metadata library / dictionary
• A better security implementation (in terms of usability, it is difficult as hell trying to set up security.)
• Ability to create big reports (e.g., tables are limited to 65000 rows, which is a limitation of the previous century).

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I can't think of anything.

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The setup is quite complex and requires extra configurations.

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I would like to see enhanced features in the dashboards. This would enhance the solution in the future, and is currently missing.

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Analysis self-service could be improved.

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I think it would be very helpful if the future versions allow much more customization and simplify this procedure.

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Long way to go to explore complete suite. View full review »

The licenses model is complicated. New features are slow to get to market (in comparison to other niche tools). View full review »

MicroStrategy should become more user friendly. It should behave more like Tableau. 

I would personally like to see more narrowcast features. 

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I can't think of anything at the moment.

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Even though self-service capabilities have been greatly improved, the basic reporting layout is still behind similar products.

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If you compare it with Power BI with the DAX language, it would be great to put that into MicroStrategy.

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The only problem is report performance. View full review »

It needs better EM logging. EM is MicroStrategy enterprise manager which logs usage and stats. It has becomes very difficult over last couple of years to use this feature to have a BI environment rolled out to users.

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The product is designed for enterprise. A lightweight version would be easier for a smaller workgroup.

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I have not seen the data-wrangling capabilities in 10.10. If that is not good, then that. Then, it needs better visualizations.

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Metadata management could be improved. When you delete an object, if there is any object directly linked the metadata, this may become corrupted and break the software. The only way to restore it is to delete the linked objects, whether or not you know which of them have this issue.

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• Visual Insight is still not mature & does not have as much flexibility as its competitors. It is very unstable while doing development or using. Also, it does not have features such as associative filtering that Qlik has. Also, you do not have many options when formatting graphs. There is still a large gap between document vs VI features.
• Concurrent usage of Architect while retaining consistency.

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The developer tool-kit is bit like that of late 90's and the developer friendliness needs to be improved a bit.

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The relationship between attributes needs to be clearer and the ability to edit contact lists and subscriptions. View full review »

For really complicated and huge projects, one should take into account great number of relations between metadata entities. New analytic capabilities presuppose R language background. And yes, it will cost you. But both money and pleasure to work with. View full review »

More flexibility for hierarchy displays, especially tree views with ad hoc expand and close. Consolidate the functional offering to be more concise in the front-end for web reports, dashboards, and self-service. 

Currently, the client view looks completely different depending on what you are building.

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