Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Standardized solution that comes with data warehouse and BI cubes straight out of the box for deployment for both Dynamics NAV and AX products. Enhanced wizard allowing for customization of BI Solution without having to go through SQL scripts to generate additional measures and dimensions.

It reduces the time needed to generate reporting for an organization, allowing management to have an overview of how the company performs. Afterwards, it allows the company to formulate strategies to improve itself.

To add-in the functionality of AI into the reporting, so this can improve further on the product as it is currently. The BI reporting still relies on historical transactions.

Five years.

No. It works on all versions of NAV and AX.

The current deployment of the solution is up to 2TB. Do note that it still is not to the “Big Data” level.

We have our own technical team who supports the BI solution. We usually solve 95% of the issues encountered. For those that can’t be resolved, it is escalated to our HQ.

It is fairly straightforward. As long as there is a connection to the server which houses the NAV/AX database and all the data warehouse, since bi cubes are generated from the BI solution, without any need for user intervention.

For the first project, we will advise using consultants to assist on the implementation, so the dos and don’ts of the solution can be known in the first instance without having to trial and error the solution.

Microsoft BI Stack's best features are as follows:

SSRS – Self-service reporting and powerful subscription service

PowerBI – Self-service BI

MDS – Master data management

SSAS – OLAP Cube

Microsoft BI Stack improved the way our clients in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution) and the agro industrial sectors manage their financial reporting and board pack preparation, from one week to five minutes.

The following areas could be improved:

Publishing and sharing data using PowerBI.

People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training.

It's not always easy to speak directly with a MS Power BI expert.

You have to sign up to the Power BI service using an email address to share and view Power BI reports and dashboards, but Microsoft doesn't yet support personal (.cox, .gmail, et.) or government (.gov, .mil, etc.) email addresses.

I have been using the Microsoft BI Stack solution for over five years in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution), agro Industrial, and telecommunication sectors.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as 7/10.

I did not previously use a solution.

The initial setup of the Microsoft BI Stack environment is complex, has many moving parts, and you need to know what you want for outputs to make effective use of it.

All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.

• QlikView
• Dundas

If you want to dazzle your audience and, at the same time, show meaningful insights, then this is the best tool.

Pivoting is the most valuable feature.

It is good for users who have experience with Excel but are looking to work with larger than Excel data sets. For experienced users, it is more of a hassle because of its lack of usability; it is not very intuitive to find a given functionality.

Its ease of use feature is not very intuitive and needs to improve.

I have used this solution for six months.

We often experience stability issues.

There were scalability issues. It does half the work like any other product in the market.

This product was used during tests.

It is easy to set up.

We looked at Tableau and Qlik; we are using Qlik.

It seems to be good for extending the capabilities of Excel but I wouldn't recommend it as a standalone setup.

I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool.

The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

I was satisfied with the technical support.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We use it for management reporting.

It's quite flexible, and it's easy to create reports using this system. It is very graphic and very user friendly.

One of the advantages of Microsoft BI is that it's easy to integrate it with any databases.

Another is that it doesn't need a lot of technical support because it's easy to use.

The smart phone application could be improved, along with better graphics and faster updating.

I've been using it for 3 or 4 years.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable.

It's easy to install. It requires that you prepare some databases for installing this product, but it doesn't take too much time to do it.

We used a consultant.

Microsoft BI is not expensive. Compared to the price of other BI products, the price is very fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Microsoft BI at ten.

• It's a user-friendly tool
• Very stable
• It always helps us to achieve organizational goals

It's been stable for over eight years, and all the latest products/versions have backwards compatibility, or an upgrade facility. It has helped to fetch many projects, and to deliver them on time, as well as helping to resolve complex business challenges. The product has continual updates so we can stay on top of the market.

• Data warehousing manager is not available, which can be introduced
• Reporting or SharePoint needs a lot of learning so you can build reports

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Microsoft has a great level of customer service.

There are great public forums available for tech support.

• Straightforward - installation, development, deployment, and maintenance
• Little complex - Learning the tool

We did it in-house.

I am not sure how to calculate this. The solution significantly improved BI and reporting capabilities. Without this solution, the business can’t think of successful operations.

It is not costly when compared with other competitor products. This is a rock solid solution for any BI organization.

We didn't do much evaluation as our dev teams experience is with Microsoft BI.

This product is hassle free to utilize for your BI environment.

It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary.

It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved.

Also, we post NGDP data and manipulating this kind of data could be better.

The stability is good but sometimes we need to validate the data. 

Tech support helped us handle the implementation to completion. They were helpful.

I did not find any complexities with the setup. 

We are a Microsoft partner so we did not look at other solutions.

It is good for highly formatted reports.

It helps to create the board report pack for financial reporting.

There is need to improve the graphical and dashboard reports; they must have tabs. This gap is usually compensated by QlikView.

I have used this solution for five years.

The product is stable. At times, it is slow when you use relational database as a data source, however it is fast when you use multidimensional cubes for high volume data.

It’s easy to integrate with the other Microsoft products. However, it is not as easy when connecting to other data sources like SAP ERP.

Technical support is good, I would give it an 8/10 rating.

As implementors or consultants, we use different tools.

The setup was straightforward.

It’s free if you have MS SQL database license. It comes together with SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and other tools.

We looked at other solutions, namely Crystal Reports and Oracle BI Publisher.

It’s cheaper to implement in terms of the licensing.

It works well, especially when implementing the whole stack of Microsoft BI solution including SSAS for data modeling and SSIS for ETL.