Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Microsoft SQL Server Report Publisher

Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (Web Portal)

SQL Server 2016 delivers built-in mobile BI capabilities.  The above tools give professionals the ability to deliver business insights quickly and easily as well as enabling a quick way of presenting the data/charts/reports over a web portal.  The portal is compatible for cross platform, from desktops to major mobile devices.

Overall a great way of delivering your insights to your data.

Works with data, systems and tools we already have. They are "additional" tools rather than complete replacement software.  Easy to upgrade / install.  The new SSRS tools in particular give us an easier way to share insights and reports to our clients and within our own teams.  Security is easily managed within SharePoint.

License fee structure.  Mobile reporting Services is only available for the "Enterprise" addition of SQL Server 2016.  This comes with a hefty price tag.  Would be better if you could pick and choose the features you require and then the price tag is set accordingly.  Rather than paying for the full Enterprise addition and getting a lot of features we do not need/use.  

We have been using Microsoft's extensive software library for years.  But at the time of writing this review, SQL Server 2016 Enterprise is pretty brand new.  We knew of the latest reporting services offering and were eager to trial it.

Deployment isn't rocket science, but it isn't child's play either.  There were a fair few standard issues getting everything to talk to each other.  Nothing to worry about though.  Microsoft has worked well to make sure the latest SSRS is an "add-on" feature that integrates seamlessly. 

Straightforward easy setup.  Typical Microsoft software (familiar).

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.

• 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.

All the features are valuable.

We empower users with Enterprise BI and Self Service BI by Microsoft BI.

Microsoft has poor support for XML.

I've used it for four years.

There were no issues, and it has good integration with other Microsoft products.

We do have issues, but we can solve them ourselves.

We do have issues, but we can solve them ourselves.

It's good.

We are more expert than they are.

We used Infobeacon and then we added Microsoft BI to Cognos. We are currently looking for a better product and are evaluating Tableau.

It is easy to implement Microsoft BI.

Several projects we implemented through vendors and most we implemented in house. We are more expert than they are.

We didn’t have another option.

Quality of data, flexibility and the performance of the tool(s) are the critical aspects of BI. Test the critical aspects by doing a proof of concept using a huge amount of data.

The integration tool in Microsoft BI stack is one of the best in terms of understanding and together with the script component can make most data imports pretty simple and accurate. Also, the ease of use of the product.

Prior to using the Microsoft BI stack the organization was using a lot of Access and Excel applications which became cumbersome as the organization grew. These tools helped us to streamline the reports and data integration.

The robustness of the stack could be improved as it fails when we import/extract large amounts of data.

Four and a half years.

No issues encountered.

Yes, when the volume of data is large.

Yes.

Excellent with online social help and customer care from Microsoft.

There is a lot of room for improvement in technical support.

I used other reporting platforms along with the Microsoft BI stack, but never switched.

The initial setup is pretty simple for most starting users.

It was an in house implementation.

Very high, as it is a very cost effective application compared to any BI tools in the market.

It is setup by the organization, so I am not sure about the exact cost and renewal cost.

No, I did not have an opportunity to do any evaluations.

It is a great, cost effective solution if the size of the organization is only medium and easy to use and cost of finding a resource is low.

• SQL Server Integration Services
• SQL Server Management Studio

There have been occasions when a certain application would work very slowly on other DB platforms and once we migrated to SQL Server the response times improved dramatically. For example, I recently migrated an application from TeraData to SQL Server and the response times for some functions were cut down from 90 seconds to about less than 1 second! This obviously speeds up the work that gets done within a day.

The SQL Server Reporting Services can certainly use some more help. Within SSIS, I see room for more connectors and easier debug messages that would speed up the process of development. The biggest hurdle that any developer comes across is vague error messages.

About eight to nine years.

No. The installation and deployment process has always been smooth and simple.

No. Product is very robust and reliable.

Adding extra machines to the cluster environment is not difficult but certainly needs experienced developers/implementers to do that.

Excellent. They usually turn around within good time and you can also request new features directly from the group that is responsible for the product.

9/10

A different solution was not used previously.

I have been to many projects and usually the setup is pretty straight forward. But even when it comes to complicated setups such as multiple clusters, the product still seems easy once understood.

In-house implementation.

It varies from place to place. But a typical license would cost anywhere from a few thousand bucks to the upper $20k-$30k range.

• MicroStrategy
• TeraData
• Informatica.

Look at the amount of data that you have and the amount you anticipate in the future. If you have multiple sources of data and multiple applications consuming it, sticking to a single solution might not be the best idea.

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.

Data Integration and Cleansing & Warehousing are the most valuable

End-user tools such as Excel is not good enough for all business scenarios.

8 years

There are some issues with 2005/2008 releases, but most of them were fixed starting with 2012 release

Sometimes in the starting few months of every new release.

There are some problems with huge chunks of data. Some of these can be addressed with appropriate hardware appliances and a lot of tweaking.

I do work on projects to switch clients to MS BI usually due to its attractive pricing and tight integration with MS Office suite. Also the learning curve for users is flattened due to their fluency with Excel.

MS products are great but security is always a concern to make the whole ecosystem work smoothly. The latest BI suite is tightly integrated with SharePoint which is great; but the set-up process and deployment is still painful.

Have knowledgeable people to make the right choices for you.