Microsoft Power BI Reviews

• It provides easy integration with Office tools.
• It is easy to understand BI architecture.

Microsoft SQL Server BI made data correlation between the agencies so fast, that the simple POCs for the dashboards let the decision-makers to migrate our so-called enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture is the integration of ETL, CDC, DWH, reporting, and forecasting tools.

Our expectation is putting BI to work in real-time data collection systems in the maritime environment.

The Automatic Identification System is a great source of data regarding the ships from around the world. From kinematic to static including some commercial data, it streams to the maritime monitoring stations. So, collecting and processing of this data and also, creating useful information are the key factors for our government entity. However, this data is real-time data which means that the process should be done in seconds for thousands of ships. We are forcing the boundaries of the Microsoft BI product right now and wish to see some stream data processing methodologies in the future.

I have used this product for a year and a half.

The product was pretty stable but when it comes to collecting real-time data we encountered some data dropping issues.

Sometimes, the scalability becomes an issue; instead of horizontal scaling, we always need vertical scaling.

The technical support in Turkey is very good.

We were using some open-source BI tools. It was very difficult to get support for open-source and that is why we switched to Microsoft.

The setup was okay because Microsoft integrated BI to the SQL product. Instead of using a special product, you get the sense of using native add-on libraries for BI. It is a part of the database process. Training is the key here.

I don't want to speculate but there is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price. So bargain wildly with Microsoft.

We evaluated other open-source alternatives.

You will need training personnel and powerful servers.

I like how the Query Editor lets me manipulate the data, and the available visuals are good. You can do everything using the UI.

Integration with artificial intelligence would help. Humans take time to review the data and eliminate errors. Artificial intelligence based on machine learning and understanding can bring the same functionality.

I've worked with Microsoft BI for a few years.

Power BI has been stable so far. 

Power BI is scalable. 

I haven't called technical support about Power BI. I've consulted the documentation when necessary and checked blogs to rectify my issues. 

It's fairly easy to set up Power BI.

I think the price is fair, but I can't speak for most Indian customers.

I rate Microsoft Bi nine out of 10. 

It depends on what the client needs. I've got multiple use cases for Power BI. There's no single one that stands out. But generally speaking, my clients primarily use Power BI for financial and sales reporting.

Microsoft BI's dashboards are helpful.

Power BI could have better metadata management. It's easy to use for a single person. However, it lacks an enterprise-grade metadata management system, which can be a problem if you're doing an enterprise deployment with multiple users. Microsoft could add some more features to its normal reporting capabilities.

I've been using Microsoft BI for about 18 months.

Microsoft BI is stable. 

There are limitations and license restrictions. So if you're an enterprise that needs to increase the volume of data and users, you normally have to go to higher license models.

Microsoft BI is mostly easy to set up. 

At the entry level, it's affordable, but as you scale up and have more needs, it becomes expensive because you get tied into the whole Microsoft stack.

I also work with MicroStrategy. Out of the two, I would recommend MicroStrategy. They have what they call the Semantic Graph and Enterprise-Grade Semantic Graph. I think the technology is fantastic. However, doing business with MicroStrategy is fairly difficult and complex because of all processes involved, but the technology is probably the best in the market.

I rate Microsoft BI seven out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution primarily for making dashboards. We are also doing analytics on Microsoft BI.

The solution is very stable.

The product is easy to use and simple to navigate.

The product has proven to be quite flexible.

It is quite scalable and it is doing the work that we want it to. 

We'd like the solution to be more scalable. 

We'd like the ability to manage it on the cloud, as a cloud-based solution. It is running out of business as it is not able to keep pace with the big data. Big data is not something that BI can support. It cannot be scaled that much. 

The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files. Microsoft is aware of this.

I've been using the solution for seven to eight years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is very good.

The solution is quite scalable, although, in our case, as we are not on the cloud, we are facing some issues.

We have more than ten people using the solution currently.

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. That was something that was handled by another team. I can't speak to how long it took to deploy.

My understanding is that you only need two people to deploy the solution. Admins usually handle it.

I don't have any insights into the licensing and payments required. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the exact version number. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. For us, it has met our expectations and we enjoy its capabilities.

I'd recommend this product to other users and organizations.

This solution is primarily used for business analytics. We generate reports so that the business analytics team can use them for their analysis.

Previously, we used Excel to perform the analysis. It was very tedious for them to get data into Excel, do the refresh, and generate the reports. Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it.

They get the data in the report section and they don't have to worry about report generation, data modeling, and other aspects.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report.

This product enables self-service BI.

The paginated report functionality, which was intended to replace SPSS, is not yet up to the mark. We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS.

There is no automation for paginated reports, so then need to make it automated.

Ultimately, I would like to see all of the features from SSRS that are missing. That's ideally what I would like to have.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the past 10 years.

This product is pretty stable.

Scalability depends on the kind of reports and data we are looking at. It has multiple features for us based on the functionality and the requirement of the customer. It's not limited only to enterprise-specific customers. Rather,  It can be used by small, medium, as well as enterprise-based customers.

There is no limitation as such. So it's quite scalable.

I have work two different companies at this time, and as far as I know, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 people who use this product.

The quality of support depends on the Microsoft partner that you are working with. 

We have not faced any significant issues, but when we have, we raised a bug with the Microsoft technical team and they have resolved things accordingly.

This is the only tool that we are using for reporting. Previously, we used Crystal Reports.

We deployed this product ourselves. We used the documentation that is available at Microsoft.com.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user.

Our company focuses on Microsoft products, so we did not evaluate solutions by other vendors.

My advice is that if you are looking for an aggregated level of data, using it for reporting, then it's better to use Power BI because everything will be in memory and it will be much faster.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

All our operational dashboards are on Microsoft BI. Visualization is primarily what we use Microsoft Power BI for today. 

We're in a position to explore all the underlying data. For example, your SLAs, how they're trending month on month, or how your backlog of tickets is going.

We look at all the respondent resolution SLAs or different priorities every month. If there's a dip somewhere, we're able to double click and then go to the actual client or the ticket, which has caused a problem.

You can go back and see if you need to do anything to recover from that situation. For example, if your SLA brings 25% and if you're dipping to 94%, go back and see why you're dipping. If there are, let's say, too many incidences from a specific technology or a specific client, go back and see what you need to do to fix those things.

We're now looking to get to the next level with exploratory analytics. We want to go into what we call explanatory analytics, which analyzes the underlying data. Instead of waiting for something to fail, you come out and say, "Hey, these are some areas that are not working well, and you probably need to look at it."

We're trying to use Microsoft BI and for what we call actionable insights. This tool should be able to build up and show you what the underlying data is telling you. For example, our affiliates may be trending at 95%, but since we run a shared service, there could be some clients where it's 100% and some clients where it's probably 85%. Those claims could lead to a client-side problem or a client satisfaction issue.

Explanatory analytics can give you such exceptions automatically. Then you can go back and work on those clients to ensure that you pull your SLA back up from 85% to 95% and ensure that customer satisfaction doesn't dip.

I think the visualization part is valuable. It's also very easy to build new dashboards. It's fairly intuitive for people who understand the Microsoft Power BI tool.

We're fairly happy with the product in terms of both configuring the Microsoft BI dashboards and making changes to them. It's fairly easy to make changes.

Actionable insights could be better. I would like it to provide exceptional reports that you need to act upon to keep your operations or businesses going. That's something I would like to see. 

On the origination side, if there are better graphs and maps to visualize data like I've seen other tools like Tableau do, it might be useful. They need to have very different ways of presenting information. If it's eye-catching, better than a pie chart or a bar graph, that's even better.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for about a year.

Microsoft BI is stable. We aren't faced with too much downtime. On a scale of five, I would probably rate it at 4.8 out of five throughout any given week.

I think we have scaled up Microsoft BI fairly easily because it's on a cloud. We've added users. We added more dashboards from our different service lines, and we found it fairly easy to scale up.

The initial setup is fairly easy and straightforward.

I would definitely recommend Power BI from a visualization perspective. It's quick and easy to set up and scales up very well. If you've been using data on Excel sheets and converting them to graphs on PowerPoint, I think this is a tool that gives you almost a live visualization of what your operations are. 

We use it for our day-to-day IT operations. I'm sure it can also be used to visualize other data like how many clients, how clients build up weekly, and the various stages of transitioning client needs into services. These things can be very easily developed on our Microsoft BI dashboard.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI an eight.

Firstly there was the wow effect, as when I saw the number of connectors which were made for this product/service. It is quite fantastic to have the ability to connect separate services like CRM, NAV, Facebook, Exchange etc. and make data integration and transformation based on these data connections in a few clicks. Also, the ability to download new visuals is quite nice. The effect of new graphics for higher management is magical and this is the good way not only for a pre-sale/sale or up-sale, but also for good impressions. Another great feature is, for example, the collecting of data in concrete folder on disk. If there is, for example, 100 csv files from other information systems, these should be automatically merged, analyzed and transformed into great graphical report.

Because the product is based the ability to quickly produce BI insights and reports, it’s really useful on a daily basis. Another improvement is definitely the possibility of browsing the dashboards on smartphone using an app, and another is the ability to quickly produce reports.

Well definitely the connectors, which is always a huge space for improvement in configurations, especially the amount of connectors etc. Also, the graphic designs of the reports needs work as they are still really strictly defined, and with the amount of output, there isn’t space for such a design realization. 

I have used this solution since it was released (a few years ago) and I am using it on a daily basis at work and at university where I work as a researcher and am a PhD student. I use it on mobile, laptop and tablet as well. Also, it has its own app for viewing the reports and dashboards, own app for creating and editing.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There was no issue with stability.

We have been able to scale it for our needs.

Personally, I used Excel Services/Visio Services.

Really straightforward. The most complex part is defining the data gateways between the cloud part and the on premises part of the infrastructure. Another bigger task is to define security model of all the datasets and reports with correct audience, data refresh etc.

It's too soon to calculate. I think, that for the correct ROI value, you need to have it in place for more than three years. But, it saves a lot of time and not only developers time, but also management time etc. Things are easier when there are functionalities like “quick insight” for auto-creating of data based on machine learning algorithms, or Q&A for using natural query language. 

I played with Tableau. I see many similarities in Power BI to other products, so there is no reason to combine many different vendors/third parties to build such a complex BI solution.

It's a tool for a new kind of business intelligence from Microsoft. Tool for quick modeling of data structures and for visualizing almost everything you have in mind at the moment. There is still a lot of room for improvement and there is also a huge space for new functionalities. But it’s a simple and great tool for everyday use. 

You should get it and implement it. However, you should get a trial version, and contact a partner who can provide some sales presentation with the live session (CIE for example) and show, what the possibilities are of Power BI.