Item: Tableau Server
Rating: 8
Author: Alec Guerenstein

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

Although it is very hard to say when is Tableau Server the best option for an organization embracing the visual analytics wave, I included below a few points I consider relevant to any decision process.
First, the obvious: is Tableau Desktop the best tool for building organization dashboards? Does it cover all needs or falls short on some particular requirements that may become rather impractical when designed in Tableau?
Second: Out of the current (or expected) reports/dashboards, how many are (or will be) shared? Is it just a few, with the balance of them being in a tabular-format ? Do they require or would thy benefit from viewer comments or filtered shared views?
Third: Who will design visualizations and what's their complexity? Is it the IT department, a set of Power-users or a Reporting Expert? What's the weight of each of those roles in the overall dashboard inventory?
While the above only scratches the surface in the decision process, please think of it just as a bullet list on points you don't want to miss in your journey to a productive decision.

Tableau Server Feature Ratings

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Tableau Server - A wonderful platform when conditions are met