Great BI Tool MicroStrategy is Free Now !! Just go for it…/ Hemant jaladi

We had a great learning experience in MicroStrategy 9. We started by participating in MicroStrategy 9 Beta release almost a year back and it helped us get up-to-speed with the number of new features in MicroStrategy 9 and understand the advantages and drawbacks of features to help us gauge if our requirements would be satisfied with the upgrade to MicroStrategy 9. We did face issues in the beta version and most of them were resolved in the MicroStrategy 9 GA and we are already aware of the other open issues.

With the MicroStrategy 9 GA release, we executed internal training of 4 weeks to impart first hand skills on MicroStrategy to our developers. We created number of training modules for the 9.0 features.

We had issues while upgrading from 8.0 to 9.0, right from upgrading the metadata to dashboard formatting. We resolved and found workarounds for some issues and known issues are logged with MicroStrategy. While upgrading the access metadata, wizard results in error but changing the access file properties we can upgrade the file. Also we faced while configuring the DSN’s on Linux for MySQL with ODBC drivers, generating Multi-pass SQL but we found workarounds to set the things up. We faced issues with dashboards upgraded. The formatting of the dashboards like axis labels, font size, size of boxes, row heights, etc. goes out of track and are known issues and there is little rework associated with dashboard upgrades.

On planning, timelines and testing, we recommend a parallel server to host MicroStrategy 9.0, for upgrading the server taking all required backups. Prepare a plan for upgrading, and SQL and data testing (Integrity Manager Tests can help) with appropriate timeframe. Based on our experience, we created some documents like the MicroStrategy 9 Upgrade guide, upgrade prerequisites, post upgrade processes, Intelligent Cube Usage Guide, etc. for Internal use.

New MicroStrategy 9 features to list few which we have implemented for our clients are:
In Memory BI OLAP feature: we increased the performance of the key reports by creating cubes and enabling dynamic sourcing for the project. Also build cubes which will now smooth ad-hoc reporting for users.
Report Services Documents: we provided advanced reporting documents by adding more customized look and feel, and created multiple layout documents with table of contents, watermarks, horizontal repeating data, etc.
Multisource Support: we developed reports on separate data sources where key thresholds, yearly forecasts and changing dimensions come from excel source and data from any warehouse.

MicroStrategy 9 has many more features and breakthroughs to walk around, we have just now started.