This introduction to Tableau Server covers sites, data sources, ask data, projects, collections, and custom views.
Tableau server is an analytics platform hosted in the cloud that can hold all your Tableau workbooks, dashboards, stories, data sources, and more. It gives you the functionality of Tableau Desktop without requiring you to download workbooks to edit or view with Tableau Desktop. As an admin, you can set permissions to items to establish who can access and interact with what.
Selecting a site on the server will take you to the content to which you have access. Creating different Sites on the server allows you to split up users and projects (such as across departments). Tableau Server lets everyone within the business see and understand the data easily. And it also allows you to explore and share data in a trusted and secure environment.
Uploading data sources to the server gives those within the business access to the data to create dashboards/workbooks. Most people won’t need information from an entire data source but instead require data/visualizations related to their job function, for instance, sales or marketing. Ask data allows you to type a question that you’d like to ask of your data in common language and quickly returns a visual response (for instance, a chart) in Tableau. To optimize ask data for different users, you would need to create separate ask data lenses.
Tableau Server allows you to create and save custom views, which can be particularly useful if a dashboard has many filters that you need to adjust to view the information in a way that's meaningful to yourself.
You can create a workbook on Tableau Server by connecting to a data source on the server, just as you would on Tableau Desktop. You can save workbooks to projects (which are, in essence, folders). Projects, workbooks, dashboards, and data sources can all be added to a collection on the server.
Collections let you collect related materials into an easy-to-access list. You can keep a collection private or share it with others. Should you choose to give others access to your collection, there’s no risk of exposing data, as collections won’t impact the permissions for the materials they hold. In a collection, users can only see what they have permission to access.