Yesterday evening (17th July 2013), at an event in San Francisco, California, Tableau launched a new product called
Tableau Online. Tableau Online is Tableau Software’s SaaS (Software as a Service) or “Cloud'” version of Tableau Server and allows users of Tableau Desktop to publish their work for others to view and explore using any internet browser, without the need for your own infrastructure.This post aims to explain the differences and similarities between Tableau Online and Tableau Server, why you would use one over the other, as well as any overlap with Tableau’s other products such as Tableau Public Premium.
USP
Clearly, as with any Cloud based software offering, the main advantage is the ease of setup and how quickly you can get return on your investment. Whilst an installation of Tableau Server on your own infrastructure is
hardly an arduous task, use of Tableau Online removes any complications around hardware procurement, OS configurations, capacity planning and so on. To start publishing, sharing and collaborating using Tableau Online, all you need are some accounts and you’re off!
Licencing
Tableau Online works on a per user licence model, just like Tableau Server – want to share work with 4 colleagues? You’ll need 5 user accounts (including the one for yourself). Unlike Tableau Server though , there is no minimum number of licences/accounts (10 for Server) and there’s no ‘Enterprise’ model for unlimited accounts or use of the Guest account. Additionally, since Tableau Online is in The Cloud, you can’t integrate it with your Active Directory, or use any other authentication method such as Trusted Tickets via a web portal.
Data Sources
One big difference with Tableau Online is the inability to publish workbooks with a Live connection to your data. Since your business databases are likely to be behind your company’s firewall, it doesn’t make sense for Tableau Online to allow these connections, for reasons of security as well as simplicity. Work published to Tableau Online will include data
Extracts, rather than live connections.There are a couple of exceptions though – you can publish workbooks with live connections to sources that are already cloud based, such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. This is great news since these data sources are fantastic at handling huge amounts of data and you’ll want to leverage their power when analysing billions of rows and terabytes of data rather than using extracts.
Refreshing Data
With Tableau Server, data refreshes of extracts can be scheduled so that your workbooks are automatically updated with the latest information from their original source. For the same reasons mentioned above for why live connections are not feasible, automated data refreshes from the server side are not permitted with Tableau Online. New data must be ‘pushed’ to Tableau Online, either by manually using Tableau Desktop or by using the Tableau command line utility, which can be automated in conjunction with Windows scheduler or similar tools.Again, there are some exceptions – extracts that are based on Cloud sources such as Google Analytics or Salesforce.com (these connections are never ‘Live’) can be scheduled in Tableau Online so they are updated automatically just as you would in Tableau Server.
Security
Tableau Online is hosted in a SAS-70 compliant datacentre, sign-in is secured by HTTPS and all communication between you and your audience’ machines and Tableau Online is encrypted using SSL. All access to your content is controlled by the users you or your administrator have set up in the Tableau Online interface. Tableau employees and other Tableau Online customers will not be able to see or access your data.Individual permissions can be also set up in a similar way to how Tableau Server works – for example, Jon can access workbooks A & B, Dave can access A and edit B, Charlie can only access B etc.
Pricing
Tableau Online is priced at $500 per year, per named user. This can be extremely cost effective when taking into account potential hardware costs, but especially so for smaller, short term deployments, or even for an evaluation before moving onto a full implementation of Tableau Server.Minimum subscription is 1 year
What about Tableau Public & Tableau Public Premium?
Tableau Public is Tableau’s free publishing option where you can upload your work for anyone to see via the web. However, as the name suggests, it is then in the public domain; anyone in the world can view your work and download your data. Tableau Public Premium (a paid for service) offers the same but without file size / row number restrictions, includes access to technical support, and the ability to control whether users can download the underlying data. The visualisation that you publish is still open for all the world to see, however.Tableau Online is different because you have the ability to control who can see your work.
My organisation already uses Tableau Server
If your company already is making full use of Tableau Server, then this new offering from Tableau is probably not going to change much for you. However, this consultant has seen first hand the many cases where users of Tableau Desktop can’t get their work published to the audience they want using Tableau Server because the way their org’s IT has implemented it. No iPad access, a complex recharging model, lack of ownership, network contention problems, external publishing use etc. could be solved by simultaneous use of Tableau Server and Tableau Online.
Anything else?
A couple of other minor points to make – you still need at least one copy of Tableau Desktop Professional (to author and publish content) to make use of Tableau Online. You can’t ‘brand’ Tableau Online with your corporate logo like you can with Tableau Server. Tableau are not imposing any storage limit on the amount of data you can publish up to Tableau Online. There’s plenty more in-depth information available on Tableau’s website at the following link:
http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v8.0/online/en-us/help.htmWant some help deciding what solution is right for you? Get in touch for free, no obligation advice at
info@theinformationlab.co.uk
Yesterday evening (17th July 2013), at an event in San Francisco, California, Tableau launched a new product called Tableau Online. Tableau Online is Tableau Software’s SaaS (Software as a Service) or “Cloud'” version of Tableau Server and allows users of Tableau Desktop to publish their work for others to view and explore using any internet browser, without the need for your own infrastructure.This post aims to explain the differences and similarities between Tableau Online and Tableau Server, why you would use one over the other, as well as any overlap with Tableau’s other products such as Tableau Public Premium.
One big difference with Tableau Online is the inability to publish workbooks with a Live connection to your data. Since your business databases are likely to be behind your company’s firewall, it doesn’t make sense for Tableau Online to allow these connections, for reasons of security as well as simplicity. Work published to Tableau Online will include data Extracts, rather than live connections.There are a couple of exceptions though – you can publish workbooks with live connections to sources that are already cloud based, such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. This is great news since these data sources are fantastic at handling huge amounts of data and you’ll want to leverage their power when analysing billions of rows and terabytes of data rather than using extracts.