Today's business users require more and more from their Business Intelligence suites. They expect not only an efficient reporting tool, but also a wide set of analytical capabilities and - if possible - an easy to use data mining system. In a real world, it never is as easy as it seems. Different vendors provide different solutions of determined specific, thereupon the compromise becomes truly difficult to settle, and the "suites for everything" rarely are good enough. MicroStrategy Report Services - a complete dashboard and reporting engine - is different.

Fully intuitive interface, ease of implementation, powerful engine, and a variety of differentiated capabilities make MicroStrategy Report Services a tool every organization can benefit from. Once it's devoted to regular business users, not the IT specialists, its development is simplified. The same as analyzing trends within chosen data - a lot there is automated and, therefore, needs significantly less time.

MicroStrategy Report Services - Users' pov

Current Business Intelligence solutions not only need to be efficient and powerful. They also are supposed to be easy to use, so that every user across the organization could use them without a need to engage the whole IT department. In case of MicroStrategy Report Services it's solved in a truly reasonable way. The first presumption was to keep reporting, analysis, and monitoring with all their following capabilities within a single, integrated platform, so that no data migration nor application changing was needed. Once there is an intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get idea) provided to control the whole platform, users need only just a bit of time to get to even the most complex and hidden functionality.

After a user learns how to work with MicroStrategy Report Services, he gets plenty of different options to choose from. To begin with interactive scorecards, through universal dashboards, to complete reports. Once the platform truly is easy to use, all a bit more advanced users can create documents exactly as they want them to be. And - what's most surprising and useful - every dashboard, report, or scorecard can be modified from within Microsoft Office suite's products. That's an additional spread of Report Services' functionality.

Once the report is done, one can quickly and easily check its fundamentals and verify each or every part of used data. With quite a complex drilling capabilities followed with astonishing flexibility, it's not a problem to focus on even the littlest parts of report findings, simultaneously keeping an eye on the whole.

MicroStrategy Report Services features and benefits

The features which MicroStrategy Reporting Services users benefit from at most are:

• single but sufficient interactive that allows to control all the capabilities from one place, WYSIWYG design, drag and drop support, and context menus,
• interactive scorecards, dashboards, and reports (supplied with in-depth analysis, drilling, and OLAP), powerful calculation engine
• well developed visualization capabilities that allows to turn every report from a collection of various numbers into a clear and easily understandable presentation of facts and trends,
• additional templates simplifying dashboard creation
• supplementary predictive and data mining analytics capabilities
• support for even  up to 100,000 users
• quick and easy export into multiple formats (PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, HTML files, and Flash files) to ensure report offline readability
• easy access through Web browser, mobiles, and iPad
• ad hoc dashboards and quick reporting
• low costs of implementation and maintenance
• no plug-ins nor Java applets required, the same as no need for IT department involvement

To sum up, MicroStrategy Report Services is an efficient tool with truly a wide set of differentiated capabilities. With no need for IT involvement and intuitive graphical interface, it also is a tool no user could have difficulties with, regardless actually of the number of users. It's sufficiently flexible tool that can serve even hundreds of thousands of users at the same time and provide each and every of them with the most timely data as possible. However, MicroStrategy Report Services solution is also inexpensive in maintaining as it expands and evolves over the time.

MicroStrategy Report Services resources

• http://www.microstrategy.com/Software/Products/Service_Modules/Report_Services/ - here's a complete overview. Every basic information that one could expect for the very beginning. However, it's the official website of MicroStrategy, therefore one should be aware about its credibility, and - at the same time - don't expect the disadvantages of Report Services to be mentioned. Here are main features and benefits included and followed with a few paragraphs of the solution description. And even though the overview lacks for any technical details and requirements for instance, it's a very good source of knowledge to begin with. It might be useful to check more about features and benefits. There are two links located in the upper right part of website, leading to mentioned subpages.
• Report Services Brochure.pdf - here's a complete, sixteen-page brochure about MicroStrategy Report Services. No registration is needed, just the PDF document is to be opened. A lot of information, numerous illustration and sufficient descriptions - these all make the brochure truly a good source of Report Services information. It's the obligatory position for the ones who still hesitate to choosing each Business Intelligence solution and must be read, however - it must remain remembered - it still is provided by the company officials. Beware, no disadvantages nor negatives included.
• http://www.microstrategy.com/news/pr_system/press_release.asp?ctry=167&id=1015 - the largest companies that have decided to choose the solution are the greatest recommendation. As for MicroStrategy Report Services, one of such companies is AutoTrader.com and that's the press release describing the case. There is a lot about the AutoTrader.com and MicroStrategy companies themselves, and also a few paragraphs strictly about the used solution.