MicroStrategy Reviews

Reporting on some daily sales activities. It works well in this task.

It is convenient having it right there on the phone. They do not have to login. They can get it from anywhere they are.

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.

It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it.

If there was a server down, we are not allowed to use it offline. Therefore, if there is a server down, then it’s down.

They are pretty good most of the time. There have been a few times that I have left a message and not been called back for at least a day or two.

Previously, we did not know we could have a mobile app. We looked at having a mobile app with MicroStrategy when we found out that we could, then we tried it out.

The mobile setup was not too bad.

We set it up in-house.

Most important criteria that I want to see when selecting a vendor: One that provides good, stable software. MicroStrategy does this.

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.

We have centralized a lot of reports. We all are using the same data. We've discussed a lot about the significance of some terms.

The administration of automatic email reports is not very good. It has to be improved in a more easily and effective way, with the same license.
I would like to see data mining integrated.

I have used MicroStrategy for five years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

We have had no technical issues.

We used Oracle Discoverer but it was very poor.

We have a very smooth setup. This was because we began with a small project that includes installation.

Setup is not complex.

We evaluated an Oracle BI product, I think it was former PeopleSoft, but we choose MicroStrategy because .mht files cab be sent by email and you can use it without internet access.

The main effort is making the DW and the models. The rest is not so difficult, but you have to implement a corporative strategy to stop using any other reporting system.

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.

It gives people access to data in a single place (portal).

I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

I have used it for three years.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had some scalability issues, but they have not been a big problem.

Technical support is poor. You have to read their manuals and that's pretty much everything you have.

The company I was working for chose that course of action. I'd rather we did a proof of concept with several vendors instead of choosing MicroStrategy up front.

The initial setup was complex, really complex! Lots of configurations and installations.

It's expensive. I believe there are others that can provide most of the features for a better price.

No other options were evaluated. My boss at the time didn't want to spend time with evaluations, unfortunately.

Compare, and if you're going to spend a lot of money anyhow, there are better options, surely!

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.

A single management dashboard is visible on the big screens of all the company chiefs. This enables them to easily refer to it during meetings. They are able to drill down on specifics. It provides a view of the current position of the companies KPIs, and provides the main source of ‘true data’.

Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for seven years.

I did not have any issues with stability.

I did not have any issues with scalability.

In South Africa, the level of support is very limited to Johannesburg. Very few local partners exist that support the application, compared to other tools in the market. I would, therefore, rate the level of technical support specifically in South Africa as mediocre.

Previously, the company used SAP Business Objects. I made the decision to switch over to MicroStrategy because Business Objects was acquired by SAP at the time. Most ongoing development on BusinessObjects became SAP-focused. This didn’t help us because we are an Oracle-centered organization. MicroStrategy seemed to be the best fit due to its being major database agnostic.

The setup was straightforward and relatively simple.

It’s very expensive. If the pretty picture isn’t one of your core requirements, then most other tools would fit the job.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos and QlikView.

It is essential to have resources available in the organization for harnessing the true potential of the tool.

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.

Combined with a data governance, it helped us to share information across the organization, to provide a unique source of relevant information, and to avoid duplicities.

The following are areas for improvement:

• Self reporting
• Metadata library / dictionary
• A better security implementation (in terms of usability, it is difficult as hell trying to set up security.)
• Ability to create big reports (e.g., tables are limited to 65000 rows, which is a limitation of the previous century).

We have used this product for about six years.

The servers fall quite easily.

There are some scalability issues. The solution is unable to respond quickly to big reports. I had to switch to Tableau, or perform pre-processing and then import data outside of the model.

We were evaluating Tableau, which everybody found to be a better solution. However, MicroStrategy is the official reporting tool in my organization.

Make sure you design the exploitation layer very carefully. If you don't, everything will turn into a mess. You will need technical gurus to understand the metadata, and the reports will be generated very slowly.

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!

The results are not in yet as it is too early to tell.

Data dictionary import would be great.

Our primary use case for MicroStrategy is reporting, including sales, marketing, operational, and financial. We use it for all of our lines of business. 

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

MicroStrategy should become more user friendly. It should behave more like Tableau. 

I would personally like to see more narrowcast features. 

I have been using MicroStrategy for six years. 

The initial setup was complex because of the nature of the product. It has multiple components. It takes 12 hours to deploy.