Tableau Server - Solid, still evolving to become a true enterprise solution
July 07, 2014
Tableau Server - Solid, still evolving to become a true enterprise solution
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
8.1.7
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
Tableau is being used as user friendly ad-hoc reporting tool for end users who may or may not have a technical background. The vendor provided on demand training is very well done and someone who has never heard of Tableau can become a functional Tableau user in about a day. It is a nice, flexible tool to complement OBIEE 11g, the enterprise BI tool. It is available to any department within the bank and is being used by roughly 30 or so different groups within the bank. There are about 3,000 Tableau Server users currently, with substantial user growth projected by year end. Each of these groups have their own unique website on Tableau Server and site administrators control who can see what. This can be done on an individual basis, or on a group basis. Also, a member of site A can not access site B.
- Tableau Server is a great tool for sharing meaningful reports. Members of a site simply access their site through their web browser, and then can view reports that drive business decisions. The navigation is very user friendly and the learning curve is minimal, even for someone who has never used a BI tool before.
- Reports housed on Tableau Server are either made out of a "live" data connection or a data extract, where data is brought in in memory. Within Server, it is very easy to set up your extract report to be refreshed based on whatever timeframe suits you (daily, weekly, monthly etc). It is easy to control how up to date the data in the reports are for site members viewing the reports.
- Site administrators within a site manage and control the permissions within the site. There is a three tier hierarchy within the content that's published to a Server site (Project level, Workbook level, View level) and site admins can quickly and easily control which members have access to which content within the site.
- There is no easy way to extract a Tableau site user list. (It can be done with using Tableau Desktop) but having an icon to export a user list to Excel seems like a simple enhancement that could go a long way.
- From a system admin perspective, there is no way to kill a task within Server. We ran into an issue where the subscription feature (an option where a user can have reports emailed to them on a schedule they determine) was gumming up our background task processors. The subscriptions would never execute, though it would hog the associated background task processor. Without having a simple kill task button, the system admins would have to stop processes and restart the actual Windows Server. It was a pain.
- Tableau Server vendor support can be frustrating at times. The turnaround time is inconsistent, it's almost like the luck of the draw for who gets assigned to your case. Many times they give canned copy/paste replies until you can get a WebEx session to show them what's going on.
- Tableau has cut down on a ton of hours spent on report creation and Server allows those reports to easily be shared to the appropriate people.
- It is almost universally well liked by the user base. The Tableau users feel very empowered.
- It is safe to say that through the ease of use (minimal learning curve, user friendly interface, well done free vendor training videos) Tableau has increased employee efficiency and improved customer service.
- Tibco Spotfire,QlikView
Three "self service" BI tools were looked at: Tableau, Spotfire & Qlikview. To put it very simply, Spotfire had a lot of overlap with a tool that was already present at the bank, SAS. QlikView's biggest negative was that everything was brought in via RAM, and there are gigantic datasets being connected to, so that took them out of the running. All three products were very similar, but Tableau seemed to fill the niche the best, and the free vendor training resources was a big positive as well.