Attended MicroStrategy 9i BI Class today. Real good BI tool & lot of good things on the MicroStrategy 9. MicroStrategy, Inc identified lot of previous issues and resolved with this new version. I have worked in the Data warehouse environment more than 10 years starting from MicroStrategy 6 , 7i , 8 and now 9.

The main differentiating points compared to other BI tools:

1. OLAP Cube + ROLAP / HOLAP together using MicroStrategy 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 version of MicroStrategy, it is supported.
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 MicroStrategy & 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 satisfy the short term goals of any BI Project to show the progress quickly & it would be temporary solution until the actual and real proper solution. And also Quick Proof of Concepts.
   Since I experienced with lot of bigger clients they wanted immediate needs of some analysis , I happened to hard code some of the stuff and put into table directly & do similar approach & configure in the MicroStrategy as a separate projects to satisfy the short term solutions. But now it is going to be the quick through regular MicroStrategy 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 were only possible through MicroStrategy Desktop, now regular business users can do, so less problem for the IT team to support these kind of Public object creation & Maintenance.
7. Creating Dashboard made it very easy in MicroStrategy 9.
8. Web Single Sign On (SSO) is added through configuration.
9. MicroStrategy architect user interfaces seems to be easy now. Concept wise it is same thing.