Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The ease of implementation and reliability of SQL Server Reporting Services far exceeded the solution originally implemented with Crystal Report. The Crystal Report Servers (3 of them) were crashing on a weekly basis at one of the companies where I worked.

We were able to reduce costs by consolidating the 3 Crystal Report Servers down to just one server running SSRS (with one backup just in case). The time it took to run some reports in Crystal were exceeding 5 minutes. The same report in SSRS not only was significantly faster (down to 30 seconds) and the licensing cost savings allowed for a quicker return on investment (less than one year).

The build in Report Builder for end users needs improvement. But for someone that has some training on SSRS, its very straightforward.

The solution was implemented and still in use to this day to my knowledge.

No. Following the installation guide was a help with setting up SSRS to use single sign on as well as SQL accounts. The overall setup of the server took about an hour. The conversion of over 200 Crystal Reports to SSRS took some more time but was done with one user and completed within 3 months.

No. SSRS has been rock solid and the server never needed rebooting unlike the Crystal Report Servers.

No. In fact we were able to decommission servers and switch to using a virtual server for SSRS.

Never had to use their support. But, the few times I have had to contact Microsoft, there were very knowledgeable and able to resolve the problem quickly.

9, see above.

Yes. We used Crystal Reports, see above.

I use Power BI primarily for generating reports, analyzing data, and supporting data-driven decisions across various functions within the organization.

The solution's data integration capabilities are beneficial because they allow us to seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources, simplifying the analysis process and providing a comprehensive view for better decision-making.

There is room for improvement in terms of customization and configuration options, particularly for more advanced users.

I have been using Power BI for quite some time now.

The product is scalable. Expanding its use across different teams within the organization has been relatively easy.

We are seeing a good return on investment with Power BI, particularly in terms of how it has streamlined our reporting and analytics.

The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided.

We receive real-time reporting with Power BI, which greatly impacts our decision-making process by allowing us to respond more quickly to changes in the data.

The data visualization tools particularly strong. The ability to create custom dashboards and reports tailored to different

It is highly user-friendly and cost-effective. However, it may lack certain advanced features present in other solutions.

Overall, I rate it a seven out of ten. 

We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding. We used it once for Power Apps to develop a live application.

Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft BI for four years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution.

Between Microsoft BI and Tableau, I would go for Tableau because it's more powerful. Tableau could connect to a variety of databases, and the visualization is much, much better. I would always prefer Tableau because of the dimension picking you could do there. Speed-wise, the latency issues were much lesser in Tableau.

If you're using Azure in general as a cloud service provider, Power BI would be more integrative. If you need a stand-alone system and are not worried about the cloud setup, I recommend using Tableau.

Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it.

Overall, I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

The use case is mainly creating the dashboard for the organization's data transaction and its data project. We create dashboards on top of this data for the top management.

I am using the latest version.

The solution can be deployed on cloud or on-premises. It depends on what the client wants and if it's available.

We have around 10 to 15 people using this solution in our organization.

Microsoft BI provides insights about the normal day-to-day work from operations or different transactions. It depends on the organization's business. It provides insights for top management to help them make more accurate decisions.

The user experience is easy. Users get familiar with it quickly.

Sometimes while developing, the front end is not easily customizable and it has limitations. We cannot go and do any UI we want. We have to stick to the limitations of the product.

It's user friendly, but it does have its limitations. A designer cannot dream of anything they want to do and just go and do it. The dashboard has to look a specific way. If we can make the front end more flexible, that would be good because it's on the server. Clients are asking for a better UI, but it has its limitations.

I have been using this solution for five years.

The stability is good. The solution is being used daily, on a moderate to high level in our organization.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good.

Sometimes I work with Qlik Sense, which is another BI tool.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Our technical team completed the deployment. It was all done in-house. Deployment only required two people.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

The solution is reliable, maintainable, and scalable. It has good performance. The security is good. The only thing would be improving the front-end limitation, which prevents us from designing a UI that can match what the client wants. Be aware of the product's limitations so you don't promise the clients anything that the product itself cannot do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's highly scalable and stable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using the product for some data tasks such as data binding and reporting. That's it.

The customization and management are very easy. 

We have found that the reporting and publishing are great. Sometimes people like to use the report for their teams.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The solution is scalable.

It's reliable and the performance has been good.

The cost of the product is not too high.

You need to purchase upgraded support separately.

The marketing will need to increase more now. Power BI is a good product, however, from Microsoft, and I'm not getting too much marketing information about new features or anything like that. People don't know the capabilities and they really should.

We find the solution to be stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable.

The product can scale. It's not an issue.

You do need to purchases specific support in order to get a good amount of attention. If you are a company that needs 24/7 support, you need to pay for it.

The basic support is good, although it is a little slow. 

The Microsoft support model has it set up so that a first call will only get a user to their ambassador. Okay. Their ambassador will not have too much knowledge. They just identify what is the issue then they escalate to their team. Microsoft support could improve their services to attempt to have a first call resolution. Right now, in most cases, the first call resolution is not possible.

We did not use a different solution previously.

Power BI is a fast application. Therefore, the setup is very, very easy. You just license it, sign up, and you can use it.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not overly expensive, although you will need to pay for extra support if you think you will need assistance regularly.

We only looked at Microsoft. We did not consider other options. 

We are Microsoft partners.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use it for taking data and turning it into intelligence.

I have been using the most recent version of it. It is deployed in a government cloud.

It saved time.

Its ease of use is most valuable.

The biggest thing with Microsoft right now is better support. There should be more timely support. We can do 90% of it ourselves by the same token. When we're into the 10%, we do not get timely support via Microsoft's support team.

Its speed can also be improved. They should come up with a fix for the speed issue and give us some good parameters as to what would help with the speed. They should give us a good white paper that has a compatibility list, similar to what they provide with operating systems, and that describes what you should have before you use Microsoft BI.

There should also be a better way to possibly do things like geolocation, and where they do it, they should do it better. If you have a satellite, offices, and that sort of thing, it would be nice to see it in Tableau and different formats.

I have been using this solution since it came out. It was probably 2010. I'm a Microsoft engineer, so I'm on a lot of beta test teams. So, I would see these items a bit earlier than anybody else.

It is overall in mid-range. Sometimes, it works very well, and sometimes, it doesn't. If it is not working very well sometimes, that means it is not a hundred percent stable.

Its scalability is good. I've used it in very large major banks down to smaller entities, and it seems to not care about the scale.

Currently, we probably have 50 users. Its usage is moderate. We will increase its usage if they come up with a fix for the issues such as the speed.

There should be more timely support. I would rate them a two out of 10 because of the lack of availability. Sometimes, we can't fix what we don't know how to fix, and it causes us a lot of time and waiting and that sort of thing. We have to have a US citizen, and I'm sure that they're just not scaled up to that.

Negative

I have used other solutions but not in this cooperation.

Its initial setup is somewhere in the middle. Each deployment seems to be a little different. You have auto-updates all the time on PCs. When you image a PC, it doesn't always match. So, each deployment is different, and I'm not sure they can change that because most of the updates are for security, but it is very important to be sure that you test the environment first before you put it into production. I know a lot of people who just put it into production because of the ease of use, but sometimes, that can be problematic. In terms of maintenance, it is not terrible.

It was done in-house with the help of a Microsoft partner. Our experience with them was horrible. We ended up fixing it all ourselves. If five was the top, they were a zero.

I would advise others to just do their homework. You should check it out first, do the trial, get it into your test environment, and then make your decisions. Don't rush to production. Everybody is a bit different. If you have monster databases out there, the performance might be a little different.

I would rate it a six out of 10. If their support were better, it would get a higher rating.