Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is MicroStrategy Web?
MicroStrategy Web is a highly interactive, easy to use interface for reporting, analysis and continuous monitoring of all business data.

2. What can a user do with MicroStrategy Web?
Users of MicroStrategy Web can view highly visual and interactive scorecards, dashboards and enterprise reports. Whether simply viewing reports, tailoring a report to meet individual needs, building precisely formatted reports, or subscribing to an alert, business users can perform all their reporting, analysis and monitoring in the same MicroStrategy Web interface.

MicroStrategy Web provides full interactivity for all reports and scorecards. Business users can rearrange the organization of any report with simple drag-and-drop actions or by clicking on toolbar icons to get entirely new views of the data, all from the same report and without requiring assistance from IT. Users can perform various interactions with the data including sorting, pivoting, filtering, drilling, or creating new calculations.

With MicroStrategy Web, business users can also perform OLAP analysis directly on tables embedded within a larger scorecard, dashboard or enterprise report. This integration of reporting with analysis is automatic and entirely seamless, enabling self-service reporting, analysis and monitoring for all business users.

Additionally, business users can design and refine highly formatted reports in full WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) mode through MicroStrategy Web’s zero-footprint interface.

For all of this functionality, business users need only an Internet connection and browser to use MicroStrategy Web. With absolutely no ActiveX and no Java applets, there is nothing else for the end user to install or maintain.

3. Who could use MicroStrategy Web?
All of an organization’s employees, as well as all its partners, suppliers and customers, can use MicroStrategy Web to derive insight from vital data and make better decisions every day.

4. What kind of information can users access with MicroStrategy Web?
All MicroStrategy Web scorecards, dashboards and reports may contain data from a relational data warehouse, a transactional database, an operational datamart, SAP BW or even flat files such as comma-delimited and Microsoft® Excel files. In combination with MicroStrategy Report Services, MicroStrategy Web enables data from one or all of these sources to be combined in a single report in a way that is completely transparent to business users.

5. How does MicroStrategy Web integrate with the rest of the MicroStrategy platform?
MicroStrategy Web is the unified Web interface for the MicroStrategy BI platform. Through this single interface users can perform all five major styles of BI: Scorecards and Dashboards, Enterprise Reporting, OLAP Analysis, Advanced and Predictive Analysis and Alerts and Proactive Notification.

MicroStrategy Web communicates with MicroStrategy Intelligence Server. Intelligence Server handles all interactions with the underlying data sources and passes appropriate content to MicroStrategy Web.

6. How does MicroStrategy Web provide a secure environment?
Security experts recommend double firewalls for the highest security. This architecture efficiently protects corporate data from external attacks. MicroStrategy supports this architecture as security has always been one of our major concerns. Our customers in Finance and Healthcare have the most exacting requirements.

7. How long does it take to learn MicroStrategy Web?
Business users of all skill levels find MicroStrategy Web intuitive and simple to use as they recognize tools, techniques and formats familiar to any user of the Internet or common Windows® applications.

8. What types of graphing capabilities are available in MicroStrategy Web?
MicroStrategy Web offers all the major graphing capabilities available in Microsoft Excel. There are more than 100 different graph styles available.

9. To what extent can MicroStrategy Web be personalized?
Each MicroStrategy Web user has a unique security profile. Access to some application functionality, or specific reports and data can be defined on a per user or group basis. The MicroStrategy Web pages will adapt and display only what each user is allowed to see in the current context. When a business user right mouse clicks on a report or folder name, he or she can perform common file-management tasks such as copy, move, rename, or create a personal shortcut. When a business user is interacting with a scorecard, dashboard or enterprise report, right mouse click will provide options such as drilling, renaming, changing displays, copy, paste and format. As always, only the options which are permitted for that user and which are applicable to the current context will be available.