MicroStrategy Valuable Features

Pietro Saglietti - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at STG

It plays a vital role in establishing a connection with predictive continuous improvement. This approach proves highly valuable for teams involved in continuous improvement efforts, especially in early production and industrial settings, as it contributes to enhancing overall performance and productivity.

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Azhagupandi Parthiban - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President Of Technology at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Almost all the features are great, but I was particularly impressed by the enterprise features. Security, like how MicroStrategy stores user passwords and the performance, especially the queue. It was very powerful. 

So, the core features of MicroStrategy, enterprise security and performance, were what set it apart, especially compared to other products at the time. Maybe Power BI and Tableau have improved performance now, but back then, MicroStrategy was exceptional. 

And the ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good. 

And, the interactive chart features are all common and valuable.

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AJIN S L - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Analyst at Allianz

MicroStrategy's best feature is that it is a user-friendly tool.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
MicroStrategy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about MicroStrategy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user156600 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Project Schema/metadata- Very flexible, connects to a variety of different data sources and is very flexible for many specific tasks. Attributes/metrics/filters created once used by everyone.

Intelligent Cubes- Can improve almost any report to run in seconds. Used often for dashboards and documents containing millions of rows of data.

Visual Insight Self-Serve tool - Allows users to create their own dashboards. There are multiple reasons this is important. Users create their own dashboards which saves resources. Users have better insight of the dashboards they require and a better on new data required in their schema and/or intelligent cubes.

Data blending for end users- They can use other data that is not yet part of our managed/governed data. It is seamlessly included it into some of the dashboard/reports that they have created. This allows users to get the reports they require without having to wait for your data team to provide the data in the data warehouse or MicroStrategy schema. It also provides you with requirements for expanding your governed data.

Mobile solution with iPad/iPhone - We haven’t gone this route yet but we did do some POCs and it was very impressive.

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Anuja Dhakshinamoorthy - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager at InfoCepts

From a data visualization perspective, I use the tool's ability in relation to chats and Esri maps, which is my most valuable feature. There are a lot more functionalities available in the product. Predominantly, I have experience in the area of ODBC when it comes to MicroStrategy.

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PK
Database Architect at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The MicroStrategy semantic layer is a great feature that I haven't seen anywhere else. I also like the mobile applications that we're able to build with MicroStrategy's apps. The solution has very good all-round capabilities. I've implemented the HyperCard feature, introduced a couple of years ago, for embedding tags in my emails. It enables users to roll over a detail in the email and they can see airline performance. MicroStrategy is also excellent at providing connectors.

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AE
Fintech Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The simplicity of MicroStrategy is what I like the most. It is more simple than other solutions.

It is very user-friendly.

The tool itself is very simple to use, from file creation to using the tool, generating reports, and making changes.

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RP
Northern Europe IT Business Intelligence Manager at Adecco

The technical support is quite good.

We have a global scale business, where we're doing reporting on a global scale. We also have local businesses, where the countries have to report in their own local data warehouse and so on. They can all use MicroStrategy, however, I would say that MicroStrategy is a very good fit for global reporting. Their reports are excellent and thorough.

For global reporting, it's something that we're going to keep to report to senior management on a global level across all the 50 countries. 

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it_user69156 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

From an end-user perspective, the VI (Visual Insight) component is valuable, as it provides self-exploration to users, along with data wrangling and simple integration with D3 data visualization and numerous data source exploration. Also, mobile BI deployment is easy and valuable.

In earlier versions, MSTR always required some technical person to set up the schema and the report/documents/dashboards for the end user. There were very few capabilities/features the end user could start doing on their own. With newer MSTR versions, there are easy ways for even end users to start importing data, wrangle data, if needed, and visualize using VI. And VI has additional features I have mentioned, which are like icing on the cake.

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Sushrit Moundekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at InfoCepts

Since it's an enterprise tool, MicroStrategy gives an end-to-end understanding of the system. The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave. At times, MicroStrategy comes in very handy to invoice the overall infrastructure. On the user adoption side, our business users find it very easy to use. The solution's dossier functionality comes in very handy.

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KéziTibor - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project Manager and Consultant at IBT

The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful.

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KRISTINA SELYUGINA - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at Solution BI

It's a good tool.

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EG
Data Analysis and Visualization BI Team Leader at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I cannot say that MicroStrategy is a very good solution because it's not simple for the administrator. It is very simple for the users, though. In version 11, we had a lot of bugs and a lot of problems. But in 2020 we migrated to a new version, MicroStrategy 2020, and now we have no problem with this solution and it works very well.

In my opinion, Power BI and Microsoft servers are more powerful and cheaper than MicroStrategy. But only MicroStrategy has a solution for mobile phones. Actually, not only MicroStrategy, but MicroStrategy's solution for mobile is very good.

For example, all our top directors and board members only use the mobile version. Of course, we have some problems between iPhone and Android versions. It's not simple to build one report for two mobile decisions. Of course MicroStrategy works perfectly on an iPhone, but with Android we have some problems because there are different Android versions and mobile phones.

So now we don't want to migrate to something else, so we will stay with MicroStrategy, and our plan is to migrate to the cloud version or update to MSTR 2021 Enterprise solution.

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DE
IT project manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

MicroStrategy has powerful data security features, which are crucial these days. For example, when users view data in MicroStrategy, they're only allowed to see a portion based on the permissions. When we evaluated other solutions like Power BI or Tableau, we found the security is very poor. They can't help us secure access to the data.

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AY
System Engineer at Roads & Transport Authority

The hyperintelligence is the most valuable feature.

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MP
Senior MicroStrategy Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The dashboard features and functionalities that come through the MicroStrategy Suite are the most valuable. 

It can be used by end users with minimum knowledge of the product. They can run a report or create a dashboard on their phones, which is kind of cool.

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it_user514302 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. MicroStrategy Consultant at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

MicroStrategy's biggest advantage is its metadata. It is the building block of the tool, which holds the foundation of the business. Not many of its competitors have this feature in their tools. Metadata will help in scalability, organizing objects and also help enhance their dashboard and report performance.

The learning curve is comparatively small and, finally, they really improved their visualizations in Visual Insights.

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TH
Senior Manager of Engineering at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Centralized server and repository: It reduces the development and maintenance effort for the team, and provides a unified user experience.

MicroStrategy also provides a full set of BI features, including:

  • OLAP reports
  • Dashboard
  • Data discovery
  • Visualization
  • Scheduling and alert
  • Comprehensive security control and more.

All these features are built on the same architecture and repository, and support unix-like OS. Thus, we can easily fulfill a user's needs, and align with all the system and security policies of my organization.

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it_user111504 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Customer Experience at a consumer goods company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Mobility: Until very recently, I ran the marketing department for my online gaming company. The ability to review reports, have alarms, drill through the data and make actions (referred to as TRX services) was invaluable. I could decide on the go or at home which campaigns to run the next day, which products to advertise or which partners to invest on. My business is quite volatile and fast changing and so need to be the tools that manage it.
  • Usher allowed us to let go of slow connections to VPN, speeding up the tasks probably by 10-fold and providing an improved security layer.
  • Transactional services allowed us to code triggers to our affiliate system, CRM, and reporting services. This allowed us to clean up the data on the go, start and stop campaigns and partners, and better relay data to other departments. It's a strong offering that most BI systems lack.
  • Visual Insights: This one is where most tools focus on, and although MicroStrategy is not the best – I rate Tableau and Qlik better – it is definitely up there; easy slice and dice of information and visually appealing reports for the non-techie businessman. :)
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BC
Enterprise Analytics Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I like the user interface and the experience has been great.

The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects.

Business systems are always going to have reporting solutions. A single platform is a good way to centralize it. I do not want to take data out of the database system unless I need to. When I do need to, that is when I am going to use MicroStrategy.

We have rolled out Self-Service to our business teams. It has been pretty good. It can be a challenge and change, but when people see why we are offering them a solution that is governed by the analytics team, they get a better sense of saying, "Okay, all the work is done for me. I can just get this, and access it."

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MD
Co-Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

MicroStrategy has become an obsolete product. It might still be around for another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, but I wouldn't recommend using it for any specific use cases. Unless you already have a MicroStrategy license, in which case it might be worth sticking with MicroStrategy for cost reasons. However, I wouldn't buy new MicroStrategy licenses.

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CW
Principal Consultant at RedScreen

The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available for the relevant stuff you can use to link the relevant data.

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CD
Vice President & CIO at a logistics company with 201-500 employees

The most valuable features are the scalability and management reporting.

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it_user807399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst 2 with 5,001-10,000 employees

I think ease of use is definitely a benefit to our users, from an administrative perspective, as well as a business end-user perspective. I found that it's very easy to get users into the system, get them familiar. 

The biggest part is the caveat of our data. We have more trouble getting people to learn our data than we do the structures, the navigation, manipulation, and all of these things that you do as a report developer and end-user. Most of them are familiar with Excel and it's just so similar that they can pick it up very intuitively. When you start talking about the really specialized data sets that we have, that's when it starts to become a little bit more hairy, so that's not really a MicroStrategy component.

In terms of self-service, we make use of Enterprise Manager. We've been trying to involve it a little bit more with some of our actual rep data, so we can start to look at that enterprise report utilization on a geographical scale, departmental scale. We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow that self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system. 

We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up.

Personally, looking ahead at 2018, we're getting into the administrative side of our cloud implementations. We're really trying to move to the cloud in 2018, so I see myself getting more familiar with MicroStrategy on AWS Console. And even if we intend to go to the on-prem on AWS, I see us getting more familiar, and it's not necessarily a MicroStrategy component, but structuring the infrastructure of the server in such a way that we're cost-effective, we're maximizing our utilization when we can. I think that is going to be a large component for us in 2018, though it's not necessarily specifically MicroStrategy.

Then I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for. 

So VI, Dossier. 

If we can get on 10.9 this year, I would like to but we're not big on feature releases and we had difficulty with 10.9 on sandbox, so were hesitant right now.

Then our cloud implementation, coming in 2018, is going to be a big play on the 10.9, I think. There's no point in us upgrading and then going up the cloud two weeks later. It's a lot of stuff, but that's our focus.

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it_user514329 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner and Sr. MicroStrategy Enterprise Solution SME at a tech company

I have always admired how MicroStrategy has continued to strive on one particular aspect, simplification, yet not compromise on its robustness. The mobile features have proven to be the most valuable to me. Their Mobile solution is one of the best in the BI industry when it comes to quality, presentation, out-of-the-box features and ease of development. My client has fully adapted to this solution and we are extremely pleased with the end results.

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it_user513906 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a marketing services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Hands-down: Object-oriented metadata architecture.

Why? Allows the re-use of objects throughout the platform, resulting in fast development, need for smaller staff, and faster ROI.

Example: Create a filter for Latest Month.

You can add that filter to any metric, use that filter in any report, add that metric into any other metric (such as Latest Month Highest Performers). Any metric can be added to any report. Reports can even be used as filters within other reports.

It can be used in any platform MicroStrategy offers: Developer, Web, Office, Mobile, Dashboards, Data Discovery… This is the same for metrics, reports, dashboards, etc. Build it once, use it anywhere (no need to create duplicate objects for Web and for Mobile, for instance).

If a change is needed in an object, the change is permutated throughout the system. For instance, if the definition of the Sales metric changes, you change the Sales metric and wherever the metric is used, the change is expressed.

This feature saves a lot of time in development and support because you don’t need to keep re-creating objects (and in re-creating them, introduce possible errors). A very small team can support many more users than any other platform, saving the organization money in the long run. In my opinion and experience, this gives MicroStrategy the edge over any other BI system.

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it_user5598 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director, BI Architecture at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
It’s very scalable, the most scalable BI platform that I know of. By that I mean data scalability as well as being able to support a large number of users. The product is mature and stable. It supports a broad range of analysis styles and presentation formats. View full review »
it_user238434 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Multi-user development environment: allows several power users to be changing the metadata, which accelerates development. Oracle BI doesn't allow this, for instance.
  • Stability
  • High-performance queries
  • Flexibility
  • Internal analytical functions
  • Ease of integration with other systems
  • Ease of dashboard design
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it_user512088 - PeerSpot reviewer
MicroStrategy Product Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Mobility
  • Ease of use
  • Multi-sourcing ability

Many of my users have iPhones and iPads, and being able to deliver mobile dashboards to them is a great asset for them. The coming years will prove that traditional desktop reporting and even working will be a thing of the past. All industries are moving towards mobile reporting and away from physical reporting (paper). Being able to deploy mobile reports on our user’s iPhones puts the necessary data they need at their fingertips. And actually, in 2017, I plan on pushing some Apple Watch reports.

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it_user511203 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Senior at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • In-memory cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes)
  • Intelligence Server capabilities (SQL/analytical/etc. engines)
  • Web
  • Developer

Creating objects/reports in MicroStrategy is quite easy and is one of the main reasons for its success. The product also allows non-technical folks to create reports/dashboards with relative ease, which would explain its high adoption rate.

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it_user123129 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Visalization Architect at MSD

Recovering session finally works for all report types. Also, fundamental issues with ODBC causing involuntary restarts has been resolved. It has a couple of very useful end-user and developer features, such as copying panel stacks inside RS documents and the ability to attach images directly to a dashboard. They are pretty useful.

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it_user807420 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Reporting for everyone; anyone from the customer, analyst, analytics, we have BAs. Everyone can use it because of Dossier and, in the prior versions, we have Visual Insights. It's custom-friendly, we can blend in a lot of data, single source software.

In 2018 I expect the capability we will use will be Dossier. That is story boarding. Because in late 2016 and early 2017, no other tool had this kind of story boarding, storytelling feature. Our CIO called for a PoC. There was a tool which was rated highly by industry reviews, which plays story data. We did a PoC. And although we liked the story boarding feature, thereafter, the things that we had to do behind the screens for the story boarding, we didn't like, we liked MicroStrategy more.

Now we can collaborate, in real time. In the past we had to wait for our business partners say if a visualization looked good or sufficed for their requirements. There was no real-time decision making. Now, with Dossier, it will accelerate the velocity of decision making.

The other thing is, now we have Workstation and Desktop on the client side. I think that will speed up some development activities.

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MT
BI Architect/Admin at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The solution has excellent features available on mobile.

Their subscriptions are very good.

The solution offers us a strong SQL engine and enterprise tools.

Overall, the solution offers a strong set of features.

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AM
Director Departamento Data Analitics at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees

MicroStrategy incorporates in itself a set of tools and utilities of incredible analysis that greatly facilitate the construction of elaborated reports.

The evolution of MicroStrategy in its latest versions facilitates the construction of objects, although it still allows the definition of schemes in the projects that give the reports a lot of functionality in navigation (drill-down), filters, ...

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it_user807384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Data Visualization Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The most important features are its enterprise-based features. The platform can be easily monitored. You have quite a good overview of tasks which are being run. Also, you can see the users who are logged into the platform. Also, the tasks that are not performing well, you can easily kill them. These are core features which are not as common in other BI platforms, like Tableau or Qlik. 

In a few months, we will be distributing personalized alerts to users using mobile push notifications.

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it_user807381 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Management- Project at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

MicroStrategy's multilarity and the range of features which it comes with makes it a key building block of our entire data value chain, starting from the production of data, where you could essentially use the transactions services to become your app that generates the data through to data blending and data wrangling, which handles most of your cleansing and cleaning up of the data. Then, you have data storage and analytics, all the way through to presentation. The key value proposition for MicroStrategy is its ability to support each of these use cases. 

Distribution services are definitely something that sets it apart from the rest of the tool sets. Embedded analytics are a side of this field where not many key players are doing really well, and MicroStrategy strategy has the open APIs and SDKs that can be leveraged here.

We have seen mixed success with Self-Service. There are customers who are very happy with what they are seeing in MicroStrategy. However, there are some customers who are not as happy, but most of it has to do with the process of data governance and BI governance. They need to put it in place together with the tool set. The tool set will only give you features, then ultimately how you use it is what generates value for the business users. It is more about educating the customers, etc., but Self-Service in MicroStrategy has been a very successful deployment.

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it_user807339 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Applications Developer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. I think that was part of the reason for selecting MicroStrategy. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there.

I don't think we have actually taken advantage of anything that differentiates it from any other product. All the reports are very simple and straightforward. We probably could have worked with any application, but we chose MicroStrategy. 

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it_user413238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

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Alexandra  Misios - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution makes it easier for self-service.

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SS
Graduate Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good.

It was interactive. Building the dashboards was pretty straightforward. It didn't take me much time to learn.

It was also secure. We were using it on-prem and, integration-wise, it had options for various data sources. We could connect with different databases, which was an advantage of this solution.

The collaboration feature, which was separately licensed, was also good. The hyperIntelligence feature was also good. They give you custom cards where if you hover over any web content, those terms would appear in your report, and then it'll give you a quick summary of the KPIs around that word. I really liked this feature.

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it_user807369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Strategic Services Executive at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The drag and drop and point and click features of everything that will instantaneously render data and/or visualizations right off the bat.

We like having the single platform of it. However, we also like the ability to go out there and hit disparate data sources because a lot of the properties that we deal with have a lot of different type of disparate data sources coming in rather than just our one casino management software.

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it_user807357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Healthcare Economics at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things. 

It is definitely customizable. We have been able to put in key metrics and performance indicators, thus it is customizable. 

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it_user262917 - PeerSpot reviewer
Retail Solutions Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Ad-hoc capability is critical to our customers
  • They depend on the ability to take a standard set of data and organize it in a manner that is meaningful to their particular field of interest.
  • Our product delivers POS transaction analysis in grids, dashboards, and documents.
  • We group analytics under multiple areas, including Operations, Loss Prevention, Merchandising and Inventory, Loyalty and Fuel. 
  • Our customers’ users can modify a ‘canned report’ to deliver the information their organization finds key. 
  • Distribution is key as well. Typically there is one person within the organization or department ‘writing’ the reports. The reports are distributed to a larger group of consumers. Automated, scheduled distribution of information has become key to running their day-to-day operations.
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it_user198780 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

In addition to its dashboard, reporting, and scorecard development tools, MicroStrategy has more than 10 tools in its product suite which help to integrate with other technologies and products.

  • Enterprise Manager tracks the usage of the MicroStrategy environment. This helps management to know how well the stakeholders, such as sales and business users, are using the tool for decision making or for daily sales tracking. They can know if there is an ROI for this tool.
  • Visual Insight helps top executives with little or no technical background to find the insights and visualize the data in no time. Multiple formats are supported: Excel, CSV, text, and more.
  • More than 50 data connectors include connectors to relational databases, NoSQL databases, social media, and other BI tools. This enables MicroStrategy to connect to any other data source to extract insights from it.
  • MicroStrategy's Distribution service is so robust that it can send notifications, emails, and send to FTP to different sets of users and locations with a different personalization for each subscription.
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it_user144300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of BI / Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Valuable features include advanced SQL Engine, Reusable Metadata, Data Exploration/Viz, Production Grade Report/Dashboard Automation, Mobile, Integration with rich SDK/API, and In Memory BI high performance.

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VS
Senior Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are drill down, dashboards, documents, bringing everything under one roof, and visualizations.

We are using mobile analytics, and it is amazing.

While we prefer having the analytic capabilities in single platform, it does depends on the use case.

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it_user702252 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The most important feature is the way it handles ad hoc queries and provides formatted reports.

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it_user531798 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

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it_user69087 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Analytics at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Easy to develop new reports, easy to change metadata layer

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SR
Vice President of Data Engineering Practice at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable features of MicroStrategy are user-friendliness and integration with the different data warehouse systems.

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it_user807405 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Technical Officer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Delivery, meaning the ability to create aesthetically pleasing information by providing dashboards.

In terms of self-service, we have an ad-hoc platform, where you can build portfolio reports on your own, so that's already released.

The capability of MicroStrategy that I believe we are going to be utilizing most in 2018 is mobile. We're trying to get to launch. We're having issues with legal, around the app store, those types of things.

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it_user807423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Analytics And Data Management at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the ability to actually embed actions, comments, being able to leverage Transaction Services to embed the tool into a business process. 

We get so much more value out of this tool because it's part of a business process. It's not a normal BI or analytics tool that has nice gauges and "dancing bears." It's actually a tool that's being used on a monthly basis, even a daily basis by our operational users, because it's embedded within an existing business process.

Looking ahead at 2018, I think the MicroStrategy capability that we'll use most is Transaction Services. I think we'll continue to build upon Transaction Services, driving actionable intelligence to the business, aligning Transaction Services to those business processes that are most critical, to help drive profitability, to help drive quality improvements across the organization.

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it_user807330 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature.

We have rolled out Self-Service, and the rollout has been smooth so far. Customers are happy. When I say customers, the consumers of the report. 

Maintenance and manageability becomes easier with a single platform. You do not have a complex environment for four or five different vendors to serve different purposes.

We are developing a mobile platform. Until now, I have not worked on it. There are plans in development of introducing a mobile BI with MicroStrategy.

In 2018, we plan on significantly using the Dossier feature. It comes with MicroStrategy 10.9. We have set up a platform in that version, and we are exploring the Dossier option.

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it_user185844 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It is very easy for non-IT personnel to create (grid) reports. And once the report is created, the user can switch rows, columns, and add filters. This avoids the creation of a lot of reports that have just a different look.

The drill-down functionality is also very good.

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it_user162021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
  • Visual insights:
    • For ad-hoc and self-service visualization
    • Faster user adoption
    • Connection to different sources
    • Data blending / mashing: Blending and mashing is valuable since users right now are currently tied up with the traditional way of getting data from databases prepared by IT. This feature will enable business users to immediately have access to different data sources, whether from IT or from their personal files, and allows them to combine these sources, and create reports and/or visualizations quickly and easily.
      Saves time and empowers business users.
    • Visual data discovery / data visualization
  • Developer: object-oriented BI modelling
  • Web services: building highly customized BI applications
  • Mobile: pixel-perfect mobile dashboards, building mobile apps
  • Object manager: migrations
  • Security: complete and secure for enterprise scale
View full review »
it_user516102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - BI and Analytics with 501-1,000 employees
  • Rapid development: Once you have data, it is pretty fast to develop dashboards that are available in both web and mobile environments. It is quite easy to develop in days.
  • Enterprise readiness
View full review »
it_user512919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Microstrategy Developer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Business users can create their reports once architected
  • Available on all devices
  • Customization options available at coding and visual levels
View full review »
it_user125418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner/Principal at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The ability of the end user to be able to design and modify their own solutions, as well as the ROLAP architecture that provides almost unlimited scalability. View full review »
HP
Senior Data Analyst at Charutarhealth Org

It is very stable.

View full review »
it_user807408 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have yet to explore the prescriptive analytics and the SDK. I expect we'll focus on these most, moving forward in 2018.

I think what we're currently excited about is the ability to integrate R. Most of our data scientists use R for their modeling. I heard at one of the sessions, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, that you can put your R scripts directly into MicroStrategy, so any modeling effort that you've done in the past can be transferred into MicroStrategy. I'm hoping it will be a plug-and-play feature.

We've already rolled out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy. I think it's good. We just need to ensure that there are some security guardrails around any open BI setup. There's a tendency to screw up something when you just leave it open. You have to ensure that there are some processes and guidelines before you open it up for a larger platform. But there have not been any serious issues so far, so we're good.

View full review »
it_user807426 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Functional Front End at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

With the new version that's coming out, I think they have simplified a lot of things. Also, when it comes to the administration part, and sharing, and the collaboration features, they are really great. You can send out comments with a filter to someone in your organization, and if the person clicks on it, he actually sees what you are seeing. So that's really great.

I think it streamlines business.

We also use Microstrategy's Writeback capabilities with financial systems.

We have the Multimedia widget but it's used for reports that we haven't yet converted to the mobile solution. So it's just to have them available aesthetically for reports but, again, on the iPad, so we don't have to print them.

View full review »
TE
Sales Performance Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the ability to build reports, then customize for different groups instead of having to build multiple reports. Therefore, the ability to build customization in the reports for different groups.

I am happy with the UI.

View full review »
it_user519399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelance MicroStrategy Expert, MicroStrategy Master at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
  • The ability to work directly on top of almost every known data source, while creating optimized queries for each data source type.
  • The ability to take the load of the DB with cubes while still baeing able to access the raw data at the db level when needed.
  • The ability to "complete" missing features in the big-data platform with mstr features.
  • The ability to create very complex queries logic automatically.
  • The flexibility to integrate various data sources without ETL.
  • The freedom to generate reports and use both cubes and relational data in the same dashboards seamlessly.
  • The ability to create simple but good looking dashboards easily while still being able to implement very complex logic and UI in more complex documents.
View full review »
it_user72435 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Analytics power on a large scale.
  • Unified metadata.
  • Fully integrated platform covering all styles of BI.
  • We deal in TBs of data and MicroStrategy works well at high data volumes with complex analytics and with high user concurrency.
  • The common/reusable metadata, whereby many objects (e.g., attributes, metrics, hierarchies, custom groups, etc.) are defined, validated, and provided once and can be reused throughout the platform and use cases; a single truth is realized and maintained.
  • The various components of MicroStrategy are fully integrated and built upon a single code base providing for optimal exchange of objects and deliverables across the various platform components. E.g., you can build an exploratory dashboard using Visual Insight and hit a button to convert it on the fly to a Report Services Document.
View full review »
it_user487488 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Perfect reports, dashboards and widgets for end users
  • Mobile and web access
View full review »
GM
Sales Director at Expeditus (Pty) Ltd

MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic. 

View full review »
OA
Business Application Group Manager at OBASE

There are lots of features that provide very robust functionalities.

The solution is ideal for enterprise-level companies or corporations. 

The stability is very good.

The solution has very good reporting tools. The reporting on the solution is excellent.

The solution offers some very powerful AI features.

View full review »
MM
Ict Infrastructure Cluster Division Head at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is easy to use and visually very appealing. One thing that sets it apart is that it has got a great ETL tool. As compared to some of the other solutions, it is much easier to process data from other applications in MicroStrategy. That's why we prefer using it.

View full review »
JJ
Principal Partner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The security is quite robust. It is more of a true enterprise solution. That made it much easier to deploy out at the time to our members. 

The common metadata, the library that MicroStrategy has made, makes it much easier to reuse components and not have to recreate them for every dashboard. That was something we really liked and still do.

The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution.

Overall, we found the solution to be quite stable.

View full review »
PD
Principal Co-founder at Enterprise BIDI Solutions

Schema updates help us to cope up with enterprise business definition changes.

Reports auto-styling allows us to design stunning report output, differentiating the result set for better understanding of the business users.

VLDB properties allow you to customize the SQL that MicroStrategy generates. These settings affect how MicroStrategy Intelligence Server manages joins, metric calculations, and query optimizations.

View full review »
MS
Senior Application Analyst at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards.

View full review »
it_user807414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It's such a rich platform, it's got so much to offer: it's mobile, In-Memory Analytics, and there are data connectors to just about everything you can imagine. It's a total package.

If they didn't do their enterprise reporting very well then it wouldn't be as successful.

I would say what's unique is that it's a comprehensive package, and wasn't done piecemeal. It was built internally. They didn't buy products and stitch them together. Everything works really well together. It's such a powerful platform and I've worked with it for a long time. It's amazing that I still continue to learn and discover new things even to this day.

We have rolled out self-service to business teams. Data governance is the biggest challenge.

Looking forward, for this year, mobility is something I think we'll utilize most. We're currently on the mobile platform but we're looking to use it more. It's going to continue to be a strong push.

View full review »
it_user807348 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Management
  • Visual Insight; now Dossiers
  • Its robust, analytical predictor
  • How we can enable program leaders, so they can be enabled to do their own jobs rather than depending on IT.
  • We are using MicroStrategy's Writeback capabilities for retail.
View full review »
it_user511212 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

MicroStrategy has a lot of features. If the developers and end-users know how to use it in depth, it is one awesome BI tool.

MicroStrategy Architect is kind of a data modelling tool available in the MicroStrategy Desktop. It is used to maintain the relationships among the attributes. It is a really useful tool, especially when you have to modify the relationships/hierarchies; you do not need to go to the database to do the changes. Instead, you can use this architect to define them.

MSTR generates SQL automatically for every object you pull on to the report. It has many options available in the VLDB properties where you can optimize the SQL.

Web is an amazing tool for end users. You can customize the reports, create new ad-hoc reports, modify the existing static reports and apply sorting, filtering, pivoting, etc. Admins can define the access levels to the users based on their right to view/modify the sensitive data. Access levels can be defined at many levels; at project level, folder level, report level to the developers, standard users, project owners/directors.

View full review »
it_user514278 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Caching and report bursting, as it offers the phenomenal ways to access the info at a blazing speed.

View full review »
it_user511446 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability and the ability to process large amount of data are the product’s most valuable features. The ability for a user to create a report without knowing anything about joins, SQLs, tables, etc. is to me the best feature of MicroStrategy.

View full review »
it_user507996 - PeerSpot reviewer
MicroStrategy BI Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I think the tool respects the Dimensional Data Modelling basics and provides features and options that make sense accordingly, while also continuously trying to add exciting and user-friendly features, and being successful.

View full review »
SR
Project Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Its Cube performance
  • Can be easily integrated to D3
  • Can be easily integrated with third-party tools/products
View full review »
it_user807375 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

From the perspective of serving the users, the most valuable feature that we have been able to give them is the Self-Service reporting tool. For example, the cubes in the report builder and showing them how to do that has gone a long way over the past year to getting them to develop their own insights for specific problems that they have. 

View full review »
it_user538236 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Staff BI Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Sharing objects, which helps the end user with self-service reporting.
  • Security filter controls the data-level security in the report for sharing with more than one partner.
  • Access Control List controls the object-level security for accessing by user.
  • OLAP functionality:
    • Multidimensional analysis: OLAP helps the user gain an insight on the data coming from different sources.
    • OLAP helps faster execution of complex analytical and ad-hoc queries.
    • Allows trend analysis periodically.
    • Drill down abilities.
  • MicroStrategy Desktop is one of the popular analytic tools that can be migrated to a server for publishing for other users.
View full review »
it_user221904 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

In version 10, Visual Insight had a major improvement. Now, it is a very powerful self-service BI. In version 9, you still needed Flash on your machine, but version 10 is based on HTML5. It is very easy to build your dashboard and once you save it, it is available on all devices, including your iPad.

View full review »
it_user139296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are:

  • A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
  • MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
  • MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
  • MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
  • Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
  • Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.
View full review »
it_user260568 - PeerSpot reviewer
MicroStrategy Developer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Intelligent Cubes: not all database environments are optimized for reporting, nor do all BI lanes have access to a proper data warehouse. Often the BI tools are directly used against operational tables from the source. Intelligent Cubes provide the ability to pre-cache the results for non-real-time reporting to give the illusion of real-time response from reports (especially dashboards).

View full review »
it_user70134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior business Intelligence consultant at Asociación SevillaUP
HTML content in dashboards

MicroStrategy can read data from a wide variety of different DBMS and web services, producing optimized SQL code for each of them. It's a one stop solution for BI: after 10 years using it I still haven't found a report or graph that can't be done with the suite.

View full review »
JD
Operational Risk Manager

The flexibility.

And looking ahead in 2018, we expect to be using dashboards and, hopefully, Dossier.

View full review »
it_user803136 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The one thing that we have wanted to get more into, and we have touched a little bit of, is the Esri out-of-the-box: Esri mapping geospatial analytics. In fact, our presentation includes a piece of how we were able to leverage placing that airmen station in Texas for the first time, based upon transports from a geospatial map. 

There also are a few others that we have taken advantage of recently. I think the chat feature inside of 10.10 is huge, especially if you are doing collaborative dashboarding.

We mostly do MicroStrategy, so we prefer the single platform for analytics capabilities. There are some use cases to do multi-platform. We just have not been at a point where we can overutilize it yet, or even utilize it at all. The cases for us that come up, they are so far and few between that we really have to take advantage of it and spend a lot of time on it, so that we can sell it. I imagine in the future that we probably will have multi-platform stuff.

We have some mobilize licenses right now. We have a small amount: 25. We built a couple of mobile apps. We have not jumped on the mobile bandwagon just yet. We have some use cases for it. We have not really identified where we can get the most bang for our buck. I imagine 2018 might have some of that as well, as a minor goal, possibly 2019. This being a huge issue for us, our getting into it, because a lot of our trucks, our medics, our people who drive on our trucks, and do the transfers, they all have iPads. If there is something that we can give them which says, "Hey, avoid traffic here," or do something to make a decision, that could be huge. Use cases are always a challenge.

View full review »
it_user803139 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have been using it mostly for grid reports and its exporting features. We are going to start using the Geospatial, which is a new feature. We are also looking forward to the 10.9 and 10.10 features coming out. 

View full review »
it_user278022 - PeerSpot reviewer
Microstrategy Project Manager & Microstrategy Lead Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is one of the best BI reporting tools as per Gartner. It is a complete reporting bundle, which includes reports/dashboards/document creation along with Cube.

It also comes with self-service analysis that helps the user carry out short analysis within the corporate level. It has a good administrator tool to handle the administrative part. It has server distribution to publish the dashboards and reports from the end user in different formats as well.

It includes lots of other features that help to take the reporting to the next level; for example, R Integration that supports more than 70 databases.

It has strong metadata in the architecture, which makes a huge difference with the other tools in the market.

View full review »
it_user505854 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We value the ability to build dashboards and reports in a relatively simple way. We can teach end users how to do their own reports and dashboards making the process cheaper and faster.

Also, the ability to import data from a grand variety of sources and combine them into a single report/dashboard, skipping the expensive ETL process or validating it before a robust construction.

View full review »
it_user257493 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The ability to create VI’s which are easy for front end users to manipulate in order to see the data they wish to see.

Visual Insight allows the developer to create reports and/or cubes as the foundation and the end user can easily pull any of the metrics and attributes into the report, graph or other visualization without requiring technical reporting knowledge. This really gives the end user the ability to manipulate the data as they see fit. They can see as little or as much detail as the report/cube allows.

View full review »
it_user406914 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Enterprise reporting
  • Mobile
  • Distribution
  • Dashboards

Most of our customers for whom I implemented the solutions were interested to see the level of detail. However, due to a couple of weaknesses we get from this tool, this was a bit painful.

View full review »
it_user314655 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager HRO Application Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Architecture

=========

In a nutshell, Microstrategy (or MSTR for short) architecture is composed of three layers

1 - Web/Mobile interface that connects to any given Intelligent Server (middleware)

2- Middleware (Intelligent Server) that

a. connects to data layer (many connectors included in the default license)

b. executes created SQL/MDX queries, OLAP functions

c. Generates pre-loaded MOLAP cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes) to speed up results (if defined)

3 - Data Access: Access to your DataWarehouse (no need to be dimensional model, but recommended) using any of the several included connectors


Attributes and Facts definition

======================

Using Microstrategy Architect you basically define:

a. Attributes and attribute forms (which corresponds to the Dimensions in the Dimensional Model)

b. Facts (which corresponds to Facts)

c. System Hierarchy or relationship of Attributes to Facts. Here it is where you also define your Star or Snowflake model for your attributes. Also (and this is a really cool feature) same Fact can be located at different aggregation levels either because you have it in the datasource (e.g an agg view) or because you ask a given FACT in MSTR to extend the value to another level. This is interesting to enhance performance using tables with pre-processed aggregated data, instead of letting MSTR calculate aggregations "on the fly"

d. User Hierarchy: or drill-in paths to see the information in your reports / Documents


Report and Dashboard Generation

=========================

Then you can start creating :

- Measures: Formulas (e.g KPIs) that uses Facts or other measures

- Reports which are data sets of attributes and Measures (here you can also use other type of objects like filters, consolidations, custom groups,etc...). You can see and export these datasets in a variety of formats (Excel, PDF, etc...) However the top use case for this report is as datasource for Documents/Dashboards

- Dynamic Documents and documents: You include "n" number of reports as your datasource and then represent using the widgets (Tabs, Tables, Heat Maps, ESRI Maps, ...) These are ultimately the Dashboards or final reports that end user will see and - here it comes the most valuable feature of MSTR from my point of view- either from Web or from mobile device - So you can quickly compose a mobile dashboard in few clicks if (and only if) you have created the right data model (e.g a solid DWH schema). At this point it is worth to mention that MSTR allows you to iteratively enhance the model and reports/dashboards (so no big-bang deployment needed)

- You can also create predictive analysis (datamining) using some of the techniques and gadgets provided as well as interactively play with data and come to conclusions using MSTR Visual Insight (kind of an 'slice and dice data' tool). Outputs from those analysis may be dashboards/documents.


Scheduler

========

Reports and Documents can be run on demand or can be scheduled to be generated and sent to target audience. Scheduler is also responsible of the Intelligent cubes refreshing (MOLAP recreation at a regular basis)


Microstrategy licensing model allows:

===========================

a. Access to all tools available (recent change, one year ago more or less) - before you had to license certain tools, now you have access to all tools in either on-premise installation or Cloud. Interesting Tools

b. In the on-premise installation model, licenses per user and therefore have high scalable BI solutions: In this licensing model you can deploy your architecture (Web Front-end and Middleware or Intelligent Sever) in as many servers you want.

View full review »
it_user250524 - PeerSpot reviewer
Development Director at a government with 10,001+ employees

It can be applied to a wide range of uses. It's a complete solution for all the BI needs of a company.

View full review »
Alexandra  Misios - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For our customers, Dossier is the latest for innovation and we like it a lot.

It's user-friendly, also the MTDI cube is a very good approach, as it helps you to use the pre-format instead of using the standard objects from the schema of MicroStrategy. It allows you to do more than the standard object.

We use a lot of data sources, and MicroStrategy allows us to use external data sources. This is very helpful. For example, we can connect to BigQuery, Oracle, and several other platforms.

View full review »
it_user807390 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mobile Consultant at a tech vendor

Building apps is easy. You just drag in your data, and then you drag in all the elements that you want on your app. It's drag and drop design, and then you can customize your visuals. They make it all easy with plug and play widgets. That just makes it too easy. Don't tell my employers.

We use Writeback mainly for regular database transaction tables. It's just a feedback loop, back into the mobile dashboards. You can type into those and then writeback whatever you wrote in, back to a database. And then, when you refresh your dashboard, everybody can see your input refreshed, instantly. It's an instant feedback loop, we don't writeback to any source systems. It's just for MicroStrategy's circle of functionality, an "interloop."

View full review »
it_user807354 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Developer at a individual & family service with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable features are the Visual Insights and the visualizations.

We are using the mobile analytics of MicroStrategy. It is in production.

View full review »
it_user807345 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • A single version of the truth.
  • Having the analytics capabilities on a single platform.
  • The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports.
View full review »
it_user132261 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sub-Manager of Development at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable thing is not the product. It's having a product for BI. We first made a lot of dashboards. They are very useful for management and automatic reports with summarized data.

The dashboards can be exported to MHT. This allow us send them by email, or publish in our intranet and sync in mobile devices so they can use it off line.

View full review »
it_user510429 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dashboard development.

View full review »
it_user26829 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mobile dashboards give people the data they need at a glance and on the go.

View full review »
it_user164241 - PeerSpot reviewer
MicroStrategy Expert with 15 years exp. at Strategy BI Consulting

Centralized

Object oriented

Meta Data

View full review »
it_user807393 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Definitely the dashboards and the VI, because they're pretty cool for our customers.

Our business users have access to self-service.

And looking at 2018, the feature we plan on using the most is Dossiers.

View full review »
it_user807372 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a renewables & environment company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are still on the beginning stages, however having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner. 

It was easy to install and implement a report with it.

View full review »
it_user807336 - PeerSpot reviewer
FPNA Analysts at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The dashboarding is probably the best feature for us. It is something that we have not had in the past.

We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers.

In 2018, we will probably be using the documents and dashboards.

View full review »
it_user5331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Engineer at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees
  • Mobile
  • Data marts
  • Cubes
  • Visual Insights (VI)
  • SQL engine
  • MicroStrategy Office
View full review »
it_user295878 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Analyst at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

The OLAP environment is valuable. The user can find all the data in a single place and through the web, without needing to install anything on their machines and, of course, once you have created the necessary metadata. That is not as easy in other platforms, such as Microsoft.

View full review »
it_user193482 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Publishing Portfolio Manager at a comms service provider

The aesthetic capabilities of the dashboarding functionality are probably the most impressive. It enables designing really great looking widgets that I have not seen in other offerings.

View full review »
it_user476271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The OLAP functionality of this product is best in class. The cubes created in MSTR can utilize all cores of the server and thus can be configured to use MPP architecture.

Another feature to highlight here is the latest Big Data Engine; MSTR's BDE is a Yarn based application that embeds right on top of Hadoop FS providing direct access to files in FS without need of any other language - Pig/Impala/Hive. I believe this is the closest a BI tool can embed on top of Hadoop FS.

The last one (not a feature though) which I would like to mention is the SQL that MSTR engine creates to retrieve data from warehouse. The multi-pass SQL is a very effective tool that provides lot of VLDB settings to tweak the SQL in regards to database, load and multiple other factors.

View full review »
it_user75861 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The best thing I saw was the excellent mobile integration. The interface is very clean and beautiful. The configuration of devices is extremely fast, you just need to click the link that is sent to you with all the configuration.

Another great feature of MicroStrategy is the SDK, with which you can introduce new charts and customize the whole web environment. You can customize almost everything in MicroStrategy. Finally, the MicroStrategy Community is very active, you can have answers faster than the support sometimes.

View full review »
it_user174993 - PeerSpot reviewer
MicroStrategy Consultant at Interstate Batteries

Web Dashboards, Mobile, Transaction Services, and Visual Insights.

View full review »
SK
President/Owner at Vassutech

The tool I find the most valuable is MicroStrategy Architect. I use it for schematic modeling. It is scalable and integration-friendly. 

View full review »
it_user807378 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

The dashboards. The visual end side. Being able to do visualizations is important. 

View full review »
it_user807411 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The architecture, it's very solid.

We are also using the Writeback capabilities. We are writing back to our CRM, Salesforce.

View full review »
it_user807360 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Developer

The option to use various administrative tools, like Command Manager, System Manager, and Integrity Manager.

I prefer having the analytic capabilities all in one place, such as a single platform.

View full review »
it_user807333 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Developer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The convenience of it. Having it on the mobile, therefore someone has it right there in their pocket most of the time.

It is a pretty simple solution so far, so we have not really gone beyond where it is.

View full review »
it_user442254 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Dashboards
  • Documents
  • Reports
  • Filters
View full review »
it_user135108 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Team Leader at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The best feature is R integration. This uses predictions for medicine consumption.

View full review »
it_user220146 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

I think that MicroStrategy has a lot of well-designed features, and that if users know how to use them or are willing to learn, it maybe a very valuable tools for them. I can recall that most users love to use the MicroStrategy Visual Insight tool that allows users to see in-real time graphs that users design on-site, using the attributes and metrics that they are familiar with.

Another good example, is the intelligence cube and incremental refresh reports that allow developers to update or create a report with a great quantity of information and store it on memory. This only takes a few seconds to show users the full results instead of always querying the data warehouse for the same results over and over. In addition, developers can schedule an incremental refresh of data on days, weeks, months, or whatever filter they desire, without the user feeling such work being done.

Update: MicroStrategy Mobile application is considered to be one of the best, for almost 4 or 5 years. I have used multiple times and I have to say, it is a great tool. Easy to configure and easy to adapt the reports to Mobile users, specially if they have an Iphone, since in the 9.4 version it was well prepared for Iphone users. Aside from that, Documents can be made to take pixel % in account, so you can make a report in the Developer, that suits both mobile and web users in a unique report.

View full review »
it_user170676 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The features I loved is the easy way the software allows you to design your own dashboard and the professional way it displays it. One would think that I was a graphic designer every time I create a dashboard (which I am not).

The import of excel files into Microstrategy and the ease of data manipulation is outstanding.

Good job Microstategy!

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EF
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at Logsys Analytics

The most valuable features are the self-service and the pixel-perfect dashboards.

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it_user158172 - PeerSpot reviewer
GRM Spain - Tools and Risk Models with 1,001-5,000 employees

I found the ability to create self-reports very valuable. This solution gives a lot of flexibility to analysts and support staff, in order to create reports on-the-go which do not need a fixed-forever template.

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it_user807396 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Team Lead at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature is predictive analytics. We also have some users that love using self-service.

In 2018, I think the most utilized MicroStrategy capability, for us, will be dashboarding.

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it_user152448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Map Charts
  • Security
  • Give best features in iPad mobility
  • Stable tool for big organization
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it_user505383 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

I really value that MicroStrategy is a complete suite built to enable organizations to quickly deploy sophisticated analytical and security applications. It has a very good balance between features, usability, and pricing options.

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it_user374076 - PeerSpot reviewer
UI Architect and Senior Operations Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  1. Synchronized drilling
  2. Custom display forms for selectors
  3. Export a single report in a dashboard
  4. Dynamic metric alias
  5. Filter panel
View full review »
it_user136422 - PeerSpot reviewer
Industry Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dashboard, Visual Insights, Mobile BI View full review »
it_user5211 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
I think the total cost of ownership is lower than other products, it is flexible and enterprise class. View full review »
it_user807402 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The Dossier functionality. We are on 10.4, but we have a sandbox for 10.10 and we are planning to upgrade to 10.10 next week.

We are planning to roll out self-service to business teams, but we are still working on that. We want to deploy a self-service solution to them but we have not done so yet.

For 2018, we want to use Dossier and visualizations. We have a new Vitara visualization chart. We are now planning to buy Vitara visualizations and we'll be using that.

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it_user6837 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Highly scalable: It is not a bottleneck for leveraging a high-capacity analytical database.

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DR
Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The whole Repository side of things is beneficial because you develop it once, and you can use it anywhere, in the Enterprise grade.

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it_user4182 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I am a report developer and find it a very useful tool. It has everything I need and with your intelligence you are able to make fantastic reports. View full review »
it_user5331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Engineer at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees

- SQL Engine

-Ease of mobile BI development and deployment

-Scaleability 

- Security (encryption) with compression

- Idea for enterprise wide BI delivery

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AC
Solution Executive DAG at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Mobile. It brings reports/dashboards closer to the business user. They can access it whenever they want with their mobile devices. It also provides consistent user experience similar to the same reports/dashboards on browser, and it is very intuitive. 

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it_user807363 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineering Leader at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

The data governance is the most important thing.

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it_user656304 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Ease of use was valuable. It enabled our end users to do their own reports as self-service with little to no training, thus requiring less support.

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it_user528906 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Architect (lets you design schema for multi-dimensional analysis)
  • Visual Insight (self-service BI)
View full review »
it_user220092 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Associate at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Robust architecture
  • Scalable reports and scorecards
  • Integration with other products
View full review »
it_user72702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
2 most favorite features are the easy formatting tools and the subscriptions. View full review »
it_user4689 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Staff at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Our BI consultants single out MicroStrategy BI. The solution proofs to be efficient and full of capabilities: large volume data is easy to process, capability to tweak the attributes for complex reports and dashboards. One more plus is its widgets that enable to realize user-friendly interface. View full review »
it_user812775 - PeerSpot reviewer
Department Manager with 10,001+ employees
  • Semi-automatic support of implementing date dimensions, including delta to prior year implementation.
  • Speed for high level aggregation by using Intelligent Cubes.
View full review »
Buyer's Guide
MicroStrategy
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about MicroStrategy. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.