Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By : Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker
Book Image

Maximizing Tableau Server

By: Patrick Sarsfield, Brandi Locker

Overview of this book

Tableau Server is a business intelligence application that provides a centralized location to store, edit, share, and collaborate on content, such as dashboards and curated data sources. This book gets you up and running with Tableau Server to help you increase end-user engagement for your published work as well as reduce or eliminate redundant tasks. You’ll explore Tableau Server's structure and how to get started by connecting, publishing content, and navigating the software interface. Next, you’ll learn when and how to update the settings of your content at various levels to best utilize Tableau Server’s features. You’ll understand how to interact with the Tableau Server interface to locate, sort, filter, manage and customize content. Later, the book shows you how to leverage other valuable features that enable you and your audience to share, download, and interact with content on Tableau Server. As you progress, you’ll cover principles to increase the performance of your published content. All along, the book shows you how to navigate, interact with, and use Tableau Server with the help of engaging examples and best practices shared by recognized Tableau professionals. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use Tableau Server to manage content, automate tasks, and increase end-user engagement.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau Server
4
Section 2: Navigating and Customizing the Tableau Server Interface
8
Section 3: Managing Content on Tableau Server
12
Section 4: Final Thoughts

Understanding what a site is on Tableau Server

To begin, what is a site on Tableau Server? Is it like a "website?" Nope. When it comes to Tableau, a site refers to a grouping of content and users that are blocked from other content and users using that same Tableau Server. Put simply, your company can have many sites on its Tableau Server, but you might only have access to a limited number of them. This is because Tableau Server has a multitenant software architecture. This just means that a single instance of software (Tableau Server) can support multiple tenants (sites) on a server. Ultimately, this means that the content you publish to one site is separated from the content on other sites within the same instance of Tableau Server.

Note

The content on Tableau Server is accessed, managed, and published at the site level. In addition to this, every site on Tableau Server receives its own web address (or URL).

In this brief section, you learned what a site is on Tableau Server. Having a solid understanding of what a site is will be useful in later sections of this chapter. Next, we'll get a broad overview of licenses, site roles, and permissions.