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Fast and Intuitive User Experience
User-Friendly Interface
MicroStrategy 9
- Intuitive and Familiar Paradigms: The MicroStrategy Web interface leverages many familiar, user-friendly paradigms, including folder-tree navigation, ribbon toolbars, accordion controls, control-click multi-select capabilities, and context-sensitive right-click actions.
- Personalized Web Interface: MicroStrategy Web allows users to format reports and save custom format styles. These include row-level headers, row-level values, column-level headers, column-level values, metric headers, metric values, subtotal headers, subtotal values, custom groups, consolidations, and reports.
Microsoft
- Limited Report Authoring: Microsoft presents Excel 2007 as the end user interface. Consequently, end users need to wait for IT to perform most Microsoft report authoring tasks through Microsoft Visual Studio, an IT-intensive programming environment.
- Limited Personalization: Microsoft does not offer casual users intuitive interaction with reports over the Web that would allow them to resize and lock column and row headers, as well as perform simple custom formatting on the data.
Design & Format a MicroStrategy Report Using Familiar, Microsoft® Office-like Interface
Instant Response to User Actions
MicroStrategy 9
- Extreme AJAX Web interface: MicroStrategy Web architecture provides high performance and adheres to an Extreme AJAX model, shifting processing from the Web server to the Web browser for any browser type. By spreading the processing workload, the user is given a much more responsive and interactive Web experience while still preserving a true zero-footprint Web interface.
Microsoft
- Limited AJAX abilities and integration: Microsoft’s interface offers limited abilities to update information as needed. Configuring Microsoft Reporting Services to refresh in an AJAX-enabled web application is a difficult task that requires significant IT effort in hard coding and results in slow application response time.
MicroStrategy Web Gives Users a Much More Responsive and Interactive Web Experience
Dynamic Report Personalization
MicroStrategy 9
- Comprehensive Prompting Capabilities: A single report can automatically support hundreds of possible report variations. Advanced report parameters, like object and hierarchy prompts, allow users to pick any business attributes and KPIs to include in the report. Users can save prompt answers as part of their profiles.
- Personalized Reports Tailored to User Roles: When a user runs a prompted report, dashboard or document, the user can only select prompt answers that he has permission to see. In a similar way, when running a report, only the metrics and attributes that the user has permission to see will be displayed to the user.
Microsoft
- Lacks Dynamic Prompting Capabilities: Microsoft offers limited options for users to dynamically choose what they would like on reports. Microsoft does not offer object or column prompts such as selection of attributes, metrics, and filters on-the-fly. This causes IT to create and maintain an unnecessary number of reports.
- Limited Personalization of Reports for User Roles: Microsoft advocates limited personalization by IT building an Analysis Services cube with all possible data combinations and manually setting up security for each cube. Then Microsoft users drill and complete analysis within the cube and within the individual instance of manually applied security.
MicroStrategy’s Report Personalization Dramatically Reduces the Number of Reports Needed
Highly Interactive Mobile BI Experience
MicroStrategy 9
- Mobile Ready Reports and Dashboards: MicroStrategy allows users to run reports and dashboards directly on their BlackBerry and iPhone smart phones. Because reports and dashboards in the BI application do not have to be re-authored for the mobile device, minimal additional IT investment is required for mobile deployment.
- Fully Interactive Mobile BI Experience: Reports are cached directly on the BlackBerry for fast, offline viewing. Reports are fully interactive; data can be sliced and sorted; and columns can be locked, resized, and reordered for effective comparisons of metrics.
Microsoft
- Need to Rebuild Mobile Reports: Microsoft suggests that IT developers rebuild and reformat reports for mobile viewing. Creating and maintaining multiple versions of the same report increases IT effort and increases the risk of multiple "versions of the truth".
- Limited Mobile BI Interactivity: Microsoft designed mobile to work on Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft does not offer a dedicated mobile client application, resulting in limited report manipulation and personalization. Microsoft does not offer the ability to sort, page-by, or pivot data inside reports.
With MicroStrategy’s “Information Radar”, Organizations Receive Data from Multiple Sources in One Report
