Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is as a reporting tool. We implement it for our clients. I'm a consultant in business intelligence and we are customers of Microsoft BI.

I like this product because it's a free software, very intuitive and very easy to use.

The capacity of the solution could be improved. If you don't need all the data it offers then don't download it because the software slows down. 

I've been using this product for the last year. 

It's a stable solution. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

It is for dashboards and reports. 

It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured.

They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is reasonably stable.

In my organization, we have around ten users. In our client's organization, we have about 100 users.

I normally find whatever I need in Microsoft documentation or through Google. There is a lot of activity in the market. A lot of other people typically would have already asked the same question that I have, so it is fairly easy to find information.

I didn't really use any other product. I used to be a Qlik partner, and I became a Microsoft partner two years ago.

Its installation is straightforward. The developer suite has one-click installation. The end-users just get a web URL. There is no installation for end-users. They just access it.

There is a Microsoft certification that you need to complete, but it is all deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud. So, there are no infrastructure requirements.

It depends upon the tier of your Office 365 subscription. On E5, which is a Microsoft Azure subscription, you get it for free. If you are on a lower tier, you can subscribe for $10 a month per user, which is really cheap.

I would recommend this solution. It is pretty good. Technically, it is at the same level as the other products that I've used so far. It has all the features, and it is easy to deploy. Its costs are really palatable. They are improving it all the time. I am fairly satisfied with this product.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten. There are always areas for improvement, but I am fairly happy with it. I would not rate anything else also higher than seven.

We primarily use the solution for integrating into our ERP so people can have a dashboard analysis of whatever is important to analyze or compare, whether it be top-selling products or sales performance, or quota analysis.

Just as a BI tool, there's not much difference between solutions. It works well with our product and it's something that customers are familiar with and they often already have a lot of licensing with Microsoft. It's an easy add-on to their users.

There's generally a sense of familiarity with the product.

It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools.

It's not even fair for me to respond on that as that's not my wheelhouse. I don't know how easy it is as I'm not doing any of the designs. Therefore, I have not had any real training on it. I don't think that's fair for me to criticize anything that they're doing.

The initial setup is a little bit technical and what an end user wants to see is always a moving target.

The solution needs better technical support.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

In terms of stability, we haven't had any challenges with it at this point. As with multiple integrations across several companies we tend to make whatever change is best for the biggest base of clients. We haven't had any issues thus far.

Technical and end user support is something that might be lacking from Microsoft. As a user when I want to find an answer to, "Hey, how do I do this?" I often get better answers by going to a  website of a company that represents them than I do going directly to their site.  Maybe they do that on purpose to help drive business to those people, however, it would be helpful if it was more centralized and the quick and simple steps answers that I get elsewhere.

I have some past experience with solutions such as Tableau and Cognose but not integrated into this ERP product.  We chose one that we would feel would be on a common platform of our customers.

The setup is fairly straightforward but implementation is a little bit complex mostly due to how the customer driven scope changes often as they realize the power of a BI tool and want to be able to expand it's use.

We're on a Progress platform, so that's a little more technical on our side at the beginning of the original project.

The licensing costs vary. It all depends on the individual customer due to the fact that Microsoft's options are modular. For example, they have Microsoft Office suite, then they add CRM and then you might add BI.  It's not expensive per user, however, as you increase the functionality or add different tools, it becomes more expensive.

We qualify as a partner as we're a software distributor. We're using the most current version of the solution.

Here is the biggest thing: when you look at any BI tool or if it's the first time you're implementing one, you can easily get over enticed by the flashy display or the common things. However, it's the ability to drill down to your true business processes that are going to make it or break it as being the right tool or accesses the right information. Somebody that gets a BI tool for the first time will open a dashboard and say, "Oh, that's important for me to see every day." However, the reality is, when using a dashboard view you're looking for a red flag or highlights. The power of the BI tool is allowing you to drill down to the data behind the dashboard, that's where the real testing comes in.  Figuring out where to get the information from and how best to analyze it.  That's my best BI tool advice. Anybody can make a dashboard look pretty. It has to be useful too.

In general, I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points. Overall, the solution is easy to use.

The solution could be more customizable and you do not have enough freedom on the code.

I have used the solution for one year.

The install was straightforward and the advanced dashboards operate on well-branded tablets.

The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive.

If you are planning on implementing Microsoft BI, having experience with other Microsoft products will make using this solution easy and straightforward. 

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

My primary use case is for the performance, compared to MS Dynamics NAV, and flexibility in data and dashboard building.

Better insights, flexibility, and performance.

Great performance.

• Sharing reports with non-Power BI users 
• Use of ISO weeks (European) in relative date options.

My primary use case is for view of the dashboard. 

We did not previously have a BI platform before. This has helped us.

It has a nice integration with Office 365.

Once the report updated, we want the system to send a notification to user automatically. Especially if the email can imbed the dashboard data into the email, instead of a link. This does not necessarily happen.

In addition, importing the dashboard to a powerpoint is not available in the report server.  Even though we go to the public cloud service, the export is only the picture, or a snapshot of the dashboard. We cannot play the features or see the data we could change in a powerpoint. This is frustrating  because sometimes the finance manager needs to export the report to a powerpoint. Actually, we wanted to export because we wanted to do the presentation. We wanted to show the figures or something like that, but those figures are just static, and are only a picture.

Finally, an additional feature should be added to add a cost table.

Actually, it's a stable solution. But in some companies, based on my experience, my previous company, using the FAP solution for their IP solution. Then for our Powerband, the BI2, the data come from EIPCN, something like that, but actually it seems that the Powerband don't have very good integration with FAP interface. The integration from from FAP is not so convenient

The scalability is quite good. 

The technical support team is quite responsive and helpful. They are responsive to our questions in their forum.

I was not involed with the initial setup of the solution.

We always review:

• Scalability
• Price

It is a cheap solution for our needs. 

It is a solution that is easy for developers to be hands-on, even if they do not have prior experience with it. It is quite easy to learn.

SSIS is the most valuable. Individually I would rate features out of 10 as SSIS: 9, SSAS: 8, and SSRS: 7.

Automation. With MSBI, we realized automation from data loading, transformation and reporting.

The aggregate functions in SSRS.

5 years

Not much with appropriate configuration design.

None encountered.

Data set is not big enough to tell.

Good. Also easy to find solution by Googling.

Haven't been using it due to the ease of getting answers on the internet.

No previous solution used.

I was able to figure out the setup by doing some research and it's not too complex for experienced user.

In-house implementation.

The company spent less than $100k to switch from SSAS to MSBI, which saved the company at least one SAS programmer.

Not sure.

Not sure.

It's a proven stable tool.

Microsoft SSRS biggest advantage is its ability to integrate with other third party components. You could integrate it with Share Point web part or you can access it from a Web browser, depending on your existing scenario you don’t need to change much to be able to integrate SSRS with your existing application. Microsoft SSAS offers low cost BI solutions comparing with IBM Cognos, licensing for SSAS is core-based or you could opt for server + CAL-based license which is very low in comparison with IBM Cognos. Microsoft SSRS & SSAS suite is uncompromising when it comes to performance. It provides very high performance and it could be connected to many different data sources. It requires very less time to build Microsoft SSRS & SSAS solution.

Microsoft SSRS is unable to provide a mechanism where poor performance reports could be prevented to run on production environment. In case if a user creates a report which can cause huge impact on server resources / performance it should not be allowed to run on production server during normal working hours. Alternative that is provided is to use subscription option to deliver reports to particular directory or email them at scheduled time (preferably non-working hours).Microsoft SSRS does not offer any interoperability with Andriod or iPad at this time (need to consider this if you are planning to develop reports for these environments) Microsoft SSRS & SSAS suite is very easy to configure and maintain. You don’t need any license if you are looking to try out Microsoft SSRS; you can simply download and use Microsoft SQL Server Express (with Advanced Services). You can create dashboards, drill through reports, charts, graphs, maps, dynamic grouping using Microsoft SSRS.

It offers a very vibrant MSDN community along with Microsoft support staff for assistance.