Tableau Server - A wonderful platform when conditions are met
Updated April 08, 2016
Tableau Server - A wonderful platform when conditions are met
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
Tableau Server is being rolled out as a platform to publish corporate (IT-developed) dashboards. It is also used for publishing data sources available for power users to feed into their visualizations. Tableau Server fulfills the need to communicate performance dynamically, as well as fostering the concept of "a single truth" based on information tailored for analyst consumption.
- Strength 1. Dashboards & visualization rendered in a browser looks almost the same as the original design in Tableau Desktop. As a developer, the last thing you want is to realize your published dashboard is a distorted reflection of your original design.
- Strength 2. Permission control. Although a bit more complex than other products (note I say "complex" and not "complicated"), Tableau Server provides great object and role-based permission control. Highly customizable.
- Strength 3. Workbooks decoupled from their sources for reuse (not mandatory but best practice). Although source/s can be monolithically embedded in a workbook for refreshing, they can be deployed as "stand-alone" sources (live or extracted) to be used and reused to feed into multiple workbooks.
- Strength 4. User-credentials management. Admins have the option to manage users and user groups via ad-hoc internal functionality or leveraging an existing Active Directory infrastructure. For large organizations, the latter allows adding a security layer by moving credential-granting responsibilities away from Tableau Admin's scope to an organization-wide security department.
- Data Governance. Adding functionality to make it easier to manage fields in a centralized manner, having a centralized data dictionary with synonyms, an impact analysis tool, etcetera, would be a big asset for large organizations (or smaller ones that do manual information lineage control).
- Simpler permission interface. Some improvements done recently, but still missing some functionality to see the big picture instead of having to review calculated user permissions at object level (project, workbook), same for data sources and a combination of the three.
- A graphic interface to see how extract schedules are designed to flow (using serial/parallel sequencing and priority values), as well as a report to show plan execution on a particular date or time-frame (highlighting where the extract failed).