The ideal software

Pros

When i first started to use MicroStrategy, i was skeptical. The reason behind my skepticism was the huge amount of features that they offer. Usually it bounds to make the quality go down. However,for this particular software,it didn't happen. It's a great experience that helped me move up the ladder in the short span of my career.

Cons

The software can be a little slow sometimes. Sometimes the scaling is not perfect. The slow learning curve is also an issue.

What can't Microstrategy do?

I started using Microstrategy from day 1 at my job and I loved the ease of being able to drag and drop different data points onto a dossier. That was just so amazing. I learned the ins and outs and actually moved my way onto the Microstrategy Team to help develop it and bring it to more people.

Pros

The thing that I like most about this software is the ability that it has to bring in multiple different sources, from multiple different data types and allow the user to use them and present them in a way that is easily understandable. For example on my day to day job I work with excel files, data warehouse queries, and other kinds of data. I am easily with in a couple of minutes able to put all these different data types into one dossier for easy view and consumption for anyone in my business with a Microstrategy License.

Cons

There are a couple things that I don't like about Microstrategy. There are somethings that seem like they should have been there the whole time, for example if I wanted to look at trends over day, month, or week previously I would not be able to do that without creating a workaround for it. They are coming out with a release soon that will make that possible and easy to accomplish. I just feel like it should have been ther from the beginning

Clumsy BI tool

I have had experience with 5 top tier BI tools and Microstrategy was the poorest (still its better than not top tier tools)

Pros

Speed of the software when loading multiple dashboards are great once everything has been properly defined. Easy to update DWH and microstrategy connection.

Cons

Challanging to do metadata and mark the correct dependencies. Design is outdated a bit Hard for end user to learn how to make ad-hoc reports for themselves

MicroStrategy 10 is outstanding

Pros

The technology is great. Even though this is one of the legacy BI vendors, their technology has kept up with the newer vendors.

Cons

The support has been slow for the past year or so.

Next Version?

We use Microstrategy to create demonstration dashboards for our our analytics software. They have a fairly robust user community and they are getting better with each iteration. Beyond the way one has to manipulate the frames and maps, the software is powerful and useful for creating data visualization dashboards.

Pros

The software is easy to install and get up and running. It handles a wide variety of data types and has many options for displaying data. They now have a compilable version that lets developers hard code the dashboards to work with input software which is nice (although a little pricey for smaller applications).

Cons

The user interface was less than intuitive, development support was not strong, and some of the features do not respond as expected. Specifically, maps do not appear to scale properly - I wound up with a much larger map (the entire northern hemisphere) than wanted (the continental USA) and could never get them to display properly unless I removed the data element and started over. Setting up dashboard frames to fit various screen sizes is a little complicated. Setting up “reusable frames” was a little difficult to master, because of the sidebar configuration tools.