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Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Score8.7 out of 10

938 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?

Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Microsoft BI (MSBI) has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 938 ratings of Microsoft BI (MSBI)'s features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Customizable dashboards

    Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)

    Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Multi-User Support (named login)

    Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

    In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.

    Category average: 7.4

  • Report Versioning

    Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Customizable Platform (Open Source)

    A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API

    Category average: 8

Reviews

What users are saying about Microsoft BI (MSBI).
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Improved Reporting and Accountability with Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Incentivized
Adam MontgomeryView profile
Partnership Manager in Sales at CLEAResult (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft BI (MSBI) to help us build both internal and external dashboards and data visualizations to share out across our different business units, teams, and stakeholders. The tools that we build using Microsoft BI help us manage and track the progress of certain performance contracts that we have with clients. We need to report on how these contracts are performing on a weekly basis to our clients and we utilize Microsoft BI to do this reporting.

Pros

  • Microsoft BI has a robust set of standard visualization templates and tools that are easy to use. No advanced technical or programming skills are required to starting use these.
  • If your company utilizes Microsoft, then it is very easy to start connecting data to Microsoft BI. It was built for the Microsoft environment.
  • Microsoft BI has lots of documentation, guides, and support due to it being a Microsoft software. Because of its popularity, it is very easy to find people that are experienced with it and can offer support in how to use it.

Cons

  • We have struggled to utilize it where the manual inputting of data is sometimes needed. It is more a tool for automated pulling of data and does not make it easy to manual input info
  • It is not really a tool for one-time, infrequent, or simple reports; it is better for reporting that needs constant, consistent, more complicated updates.
  • It is difficult and challenging to share dashboards and reporting outside of our organization. We often have to come up with workarounds to share externally.

Return on Investment

  • We structure some of our external client meetings around Microsoft BI dashboards. They are the backdrop for every meeting. Our clients respond very positively to this and it has improved the quality of our meetings.
  • The analysis that we are able to glean from Microsoft BI has improved the accountability and performance with some of our client contracts. It has shined a light in areas where we are exceling, and areas that need improvement.
  • Microsoft BI has become our centralized source for data and reports. We no longer have different teams working off of various spreadsheets, referencing different data sources. This has improved our communication and operations across different business units.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Cloud, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and Airtable

Other Software Used

Airtable, Asana, Smartsheet

Microsoft BI (MSBI) maximized our business and product management.

Incentivized
Jessé PaixãoView profile
Analista de operações de TI in Information Technology at Flex Contact Center (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft BI (MSBI) facilitates my data analysis for strategic decision-making within the sector and the corporation as a whole, allowing me to easily connect, process, and share insights among team members or across departments.

Pros

  • It facilitates the analysis and processing of raw data.
  • It helps us to have a clear view of internal KPIs.

Cons

  • Microsoft BI (MSBI) facilitates the analysis of our customers' preference data.
  • It assists in corporate decision-making, since Microsoft BI (MSBI) allows us to compare revenue and production data quickly and easily.

Return on Investment

  • With Microsoft BI (MSBI), we were able to predict when we need to create new versions of our products, before the customer even requests them.
  • We improved insights regarding customer preferences.

Usability

Other Software Used

Atlassian Jira, Google Workspace, Azure Synapse Analytics

Power BI: Swiss army knife in data visualization

Incentivized
Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Power BI in our case is used like a glorified dahsboard, allowing us to integrate data from multiple sources. It gives us the ability to start at a 100 mile high view for quick infromation, and then the ability to drill down to the single digit, making it very conveniant to drive outcomes.

Pros

  • Dashboard
  • Integration with Microsoft Data Sources
  • Data Drills
  • Quick templates

Cons

  • Would love to see Microsoft develop more plugins into 3rd party systems for faster and more secure connections.
  • Would love to see the desktop developer app go away and take it into the cloud to manage and publish.
  • Would love to see the solution evolve more, maybe with CoPilot making it more end user friendly, for less reliance on IT intervention.

Return on Investment

  • Quicker data trends and decision making
  • Cost effective reporting
  • 70% efficient in development, but could use more plugins

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Server

Other Software Used

Tableau Server, Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense), Looker

great product

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it for building a report portal.

Pros

  • It reads data from MS SQL Server datamart and displays on reports
  • we can control user access on this tool
  • we can also create cubical aggregations of data metrics using this tool.

Cons

  • we are able to do what we want to do

Return on Investment

  • great return on investment

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

Good tool for analyzing your office working data with real time sharing.

Von Varun PasanView profile
Sr. Account Manager in Human Resources at Pinnacle Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was short tenure that i used on trial basis. I used for managing & tracking my client job openings, individual performance of my team member, tracking all the rejections. It really helps to maintain all data in real time where i was easily able to track about overcall our performance metrics to maintain the client score card ratio.

Pros

  • Data Management in real time where you can connect to other data sources very easily. I got 5 team member who were making their day-to-day excel sheet of their working activity and with the help of MSBI, I was able to merge all the data at single platform and was able to remove duplicate entries and to track repeated positions. It really helped to understand where we were lacking and where we need improvement on our performance.

Cons

  • As mentioned, i had a little used of it for a month only so i am not sure if i had any issue with MSBI.

Usability

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