Many of you familiar with data visualization have heard or used Tableau Business Intelligence platform. And while Tableau software takes many shapes and sizes, including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, Tableau Online, and Tableau Server we will be describing for you today.
Whilst you are paving the road to learning more about Tableau products, here’s another great article on How to Connect Data Sources to Tableau: Practical Guide. Saved it for later? Great! Let’s go ahead and find out the benefits of using Tableau server and what this Tableau server is all about.
What is Tableau Server?
So what is Tableau Server, you would ask. Tableau Server is a Business Intelligence application that allows its users to organize, edit, share, and collaborate on Tableau dashboards.
While Tableau Online is a paid add-on that keeps your data fully hosted on Tableau, Tableau Server allows you to store data on your chosen cloud storage or your own on-premises server
While Tableau Desktop is designed for you to create dashboards, Tableau Server is made for you and your organization to organize and share those dashboards. Tableau Server allows you to edit your stories, dashboards and workbooks and at the same time choose who has access to them and to what extent.
Tableau Server Benefits for IT Projects
Tableau Server has a list of advantages for IT projects and other big data companies, let’s review these Tableau server benefits now:
Tableau Server Benefit 1: Scheduling
The first item on the list of Tableau server benefits is scheduling. All businesses in one way or another monitor their performance, and in most cases, they do so by the use of key performance indicators (KPIs).
Say your Tableau dashboard contains a revenue graph. By using Tableau Server you gain the ability to send out an email to certain people interested in the progress of the said revenue graph. This email will contain a snapshot of your dashboard at any time interval you’ve set up.
Tableau Server Benefit 2: Notifying
Data findings not only look pretty in a colourful dashboard but also help us make data-driven decisions faster and more efficiently. This is one of the reasons why companies love data, and which also allows them to stay ahead of their competitors.
Tableau Server gives you an opportunity to set up a notification system that activates once one of your metrics has reached a certain goal. This can be highly useful for budgeting and expense control, with the notifications being sent directly to your finance director.
Tableau Server Benefit 3: Organizing
You have all of your data in one place. All of it. Think about it for a second. No more searching for specific reports or uneven numbers on the same matter coming from different departments.
Tableau Servers lets you organize your dashboards into projects while having full control over who is able to see them, adjust them, share them and interact with them in all ways possible.
Tableau Server Benefit 4: Licensing
As you know, Tableau software builds its payment system on the number of user types you purchase. If you choose to host on Tableau Server you get a Tableau Creator for $70 user/month, Tableau Explorer for $35 user/month, and Tableau Viewer for $12 user/month.
This payment model, although at first quite confusing, later provides a safe platform for guest access where a stakeholder or an interested party has an ability to review given Tableau dashboard without having to install or possess Tableau Desktop itself.
Tableau Server Benefit 5: Customization
Great news! If your company enjoys and thrives on customization, you’ll love this extra perk. Tableau Server possesses magical APIs, or application programming interfaces, meaning you can use your (or someone else’s) programming skills to tweak, edit and play around with your Tableau dashboards and extracts.
Tableau Server Benefit 6: Viewing
The next item on the benefits of using Tableau server list is the ability to create custom views. The same monthly performance dashboard can be set up to be displayed differently within your design and accounting departments.
You can also customize your views based on the devices being used, so for the laptop, IPad and desktop, the same dashboard may look quite different.
Tableau Server Benefit 7: Processing
You know how sometimes you have a question you want to directly ask from a piece of equipment, especially why it’s not working, but you can’t? Well, now you can ask anything!
Tableau Server presents Natural Language Processing (NLP) function called Ask Data, which allows you to ask questions in the comfortable form and get an answer regarding any published data you might want to explore.
Tableau Server Benefit 8: Explanations
We know that looking at data is not always enough to get the insights you might want. So what if maybe, just maybe, there was an incredibly smart being that could look at your data and explain what’s going on?
There is. Tableau Server offers explanations for your data from Artificial Intelligence. Being built on advanced statistical models, this beautiful helper called Explain Data will allow you to uncover findings you probably most likely would have not found otherwise.
Tableau Server Benefit 9: Multitude
Tableau Server might get greedy with the user types and their numbers, but it is definitely generous when it comes to this. Tableau Server provides you with an opportunity to create and support multiple websites at absolutely no additional cost, and isn’t that on itself – juts lovely?
Tableau Server Benefit 10: Security
Since you’ve chosen Tableau Server you clearly care about data security. When you go with hosting on your own server instead of online, you get full control over the server your Tableau software runs on.
This gives you a carte blanche on setting up your specs and tweaking them up or down and locate your server on-premises. Every company that deals with data privacy policies and precautions knows how crucial this little but not so much detail can be.
Conclusion
Now that you know the top Tableau server benefits and what is Tableau server, check out our other awesome articles to turn your company data-driven:
