We have updated our Power Tools branding. Any references to software/feature naming conventions may no longer be accurate in this article.

Power Tools’ Product Evangelist, Matthew Miller, gives a quick preview of the Enterprise Deployment Tool for Tableau.

Miller starts by outlining one of the most common requests from InterWorks’ clients – the ability to promote Tableau workbooks from site to site or server to server in a controllable, auditable way.

He details how it would be great if there was a way to simply click Run, take the workbooks we’ve selected based on filters we’ve specified, and then promote them to a target environment. The ability to make transformations while this process occurs would also be a huge plus. Even better, what if we could archive workbooks and have true version control for Tableau Server? What if there was a tool that could enable us to do all of those things?

InterWorks created just the tool, and it’s called the Enterprise Deployment Tool for Tableau.

Key Features

Miller went on to outline all of the key features in the EDT that one would encounter from start to finish:

Select Plan

This is where users choose/create a plan for their deployment. A visual displays makes selecting these plans simple.

Servers

This is where users select their source server and their target server for the deployment.

Workbooks

  • Selection – This lets users select which workbooks to promote. They can promote all workbooks, specific subsets or filter by rules.
  • Mapping – This allows you to keep workbook names consistent across dev and prod environments.
  • Transformations – This is where users can perform transformations like URL actions, stripping out images or removing tooltips. If it can be done in Tableau Desktop, it can be done here.

Data Source Mapping

Here you can change databases, remove extracts and replace data sources.

Options

This is where you can enable things like version control.

Run Deployment

Once the plan is defined, the deployment can be run from here.

The Final Product

Miller finished the presentation by showing what the deployment looks like on the target server once completed. He went to his Archive folder to illustrate how neatly the EDT organized the different versions of the workbooks he just promoted.

You can learn more about the EDT at the official Enterprise Deployment Tool for Tableau page.
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