Attended Microstrategy 9i BI class today

Attended Microstrategy 9i BI Class today:

Real good BI tool & lot of good things on the Microstrategy 9i.
Microstrategy identified lot of previous issues had been resolved with this new version. I had worked in the Datawarehouse environment more than 10 years starting from MSTR 6 , 7 , 8i & now it is 9i.

The main thing I see compared to other BI tools:
1) OLAP Cube + ROLAP / HOLAP together using MSTR architect.
2) While drilling it can go from predefined cube to regular reports to detail level executed from database. No tool supports this. [I liked this very much]
The problem with other tools are :
While building cube you need to specify all of the levels / dimensions into one cube , there is no way you can link multiple cubes link together in other tools. But In New Microstrategy , it supports that.
3) Dashboards are really interactive, I am sure users are going to like it very much.
4) Way to implement quick & dirty way of importing excel data sources directly to MSTR & do the quick Proof of concept to satisfy immediate needs of urgent user without going through the regular ETL Process & getting the data out through DB.
-- This satisfys the short term goals of any BI Project to show the progress quickly & it would be temprary solution until the actual and real proper solution. And also Quick Proof of Concepts.
Since I experienced with lot of bigger clients they wated immediate needs of some analysis , I happend to hard code some of the stuff & put into table directly & do similar approach & configure in the MSTR as a sepearte projects to satisfy the short term solutions. But now it is going to be the quick through regualr MSTR project itself.
5) Prepackaging integration of schema objects from distributed team environment also good. Because most of the BI projects are in the distributed environment nowadays. It is kind of similar to sending Cognos metadata files & migration.
6) Lot of things which done through MSTR Desktop now , regular business users can do , so less problem for the IT team to support these kind of Public object creation & Maintanance.
7) Creating Dashboard made it very easy in MSTR 9i.
8) Web Single Sign On is added through configuration
9)MSTR architect user interfaces seems to be easy now. Conceptwise it is samething.

I will write more about it once I go through full.

Thanks,
Srini Centhala,
www.absolut-e.com