April 3, 2014 at 5:11 pm
Kind of open-ended question, but I'm trying to woo my employer away from a disastrous engagement with Oracle to implement OBIEE (and OBIA) towards a Microsoft solution. The only thing that concerns me is that MS BI seems to focus heavily on using Excel to display business intelligence, and that the SharePoint dashboard solution is kind of dated looking.
Wanted to ask whether anyone with experience in this realm could offer some guidance - hoping for a solution where we can use SSIS/SSRS (maybe)/SSAS but still deliver very attractive (even flashy) dashboards and visualization to end users and C level management. Dundas looks pretty decent, and SharePoint while not beautiful will do in a pinch, but any other suggestions?
Thanks
April 4, 2014 at 1:16 am
Check out Power View, the flashy looking self-service BI dashboarding tool. Power View is available in SharePoint, but also in Excel 2013 (but the data needs to be in Excel). Power View works on top of SSAS.
With SSRS, you can also build decent reports and dashboards, but it takes some skill.
And yes, you can also build reports and dashboards in Excel. Admit it, it's the tool end users love 😀
If you are a bit skilled in it (and you don't need to be a developer for that), you can produce some awesome dashboards/graphs in Excel.
A nice book will be released soon: Dashboarding and Reporting with Power Pivot and Excel: How to Design and Create a Financial Dashboard with PowerPivot ?
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April 4, 2014 at 2:35 pm
When we say Excel are we talking about end users actually opening up Excel to view the dashboards or do you mean as an authoring tool? Our end users (executives and managers) absolutely will not open a client application (other than a browser) to view dashboards and reports...
I'll check out powerview - thanks
April 4, 2014 at 8:56 pm
I'm pretty new to the BI game, so bear with me.
We are currently transitioning to SSAS/SSRS from a reporting module built on top of MS Access that exports data to predefined Excel templates.
As we are using 2008 R2, SSRS looks pretty dated, but the team cares more about the data than looking pretty. This is a very good thing for me because I couldn't handle a situation like yours where someone cares more about vanity than functionality! 😛
Regardless, we also need reporting for our website and clients. That changes thing. Vanity is pretty important when it comes to clients, but functionality is also as equally important too. Therefore, I've been testing Tableau for our external reporting that can out the box, integrate right into our website with minimal effort. It's very attractive, sexy and easy to use with any setup or data source. The only issue is that it can be pretty pricey the first year, but significantly drops therefore after. Costs are broken down by seat (login) and report builder.
Check it out. Free trials are available. They also just introduced a cloud version as well. I believe the data space for the cloud is like 100GB per seat.
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April 5, 2014 at 3:02 am
baal32 (4/4/2014)
When we say Excel are we talking about end users actually opening up Excel to view the dashboards or do you mean as an authoring tool? Our end users (executives and managers) absolutely will not open a client application (other than a browser) to view dashboards and reports...I'll check out powerview - thanks
When used on the desktop, Excel is usually about pivot tables and graphs. The typical users are analysts and power users. The advantage of Excel is that everyone is familiar with it. You can also use it on SharePoint as Excel services (which is in the browser), there you can use it for solely displaying purposes.
Viewing SSRS reports and dashboards is also through the browser.
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