How do organizations use Tableau to provide powerful embedded analytics to their customers & partners?
Tableau and trusted Gold Partner XeoMatrix, talked about the amazing embedded capabilities Tableau offers and why you as a business & IT leader should care about embedded analytics. Learn how XeoMatrix and Tableau can jumpstart your development and simplify your embedded solution deployment.
Dawn Williams, Senior Embedded Analysts Specialist at Tableau, and Chris Monahon, President at XeoMatrix, talked about the opportunities in embedded analytics and demoed embedded strategies using Tableau.
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Read the Transcript
Stuart Tinsley 00:16
All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining this webinar on Discovering the Power of Embedded Analytics. I will be your host today, my name is Stuart Tinsley. I manage client success for XeoMatrix and we are a Gold partner for Tableau. I’ve been using Tableau for about eight years. I’ve always been passionate about data and certainly embedded analytics, which is our topic today.
Stuart Tinsley 00:45
Our agenda is really awesome. Today, we’re gonna hear from a few speakers, we have Dawn Williams, Senior Embedded Analytics Specialist at Tableau, she’s going to be talking about the opportunity, and the why behind embedded analytics. We’ll also hear from Chris Monahon, President of XeoMatrix, he’ll be talking about embedded strategies using Tableau. We’ll also have a Q&A at the end for 15 minutes. We’ll take questions with our panelists here, we’ll have some closing remarks and some takeaways following the webinar.
Stuart Tinsley 01:23
This is a webinar so everyone will be muted with the exception of our panelists. If you have any questions, and we certainly encourage you to ask questions, please use the chat option or if you’d like to ask your question privately, you can do so with the Q&A option at the bottom of the Zoom. You’ll have 15 minutes at the end for Q&A with our panelists. We’re going to introduce our first speaker, Dawn Williams, Dawn’s a Senior Embedded Analytics Specialist at Tableau, she’s going to be speaking about the opportunity around embedded analytics. We’ll be sharing some examples around how other customers have been successful. Dawn, over to you.
Dawn Williams 02:01
Perfect, thank you, Stuart. I must say, this is the first webinar of the year, and I’m really excited it’s with XeoMatrix because I spent the last 20 years in technology solution sales with 10 in embedded specific, and XeoMatrix has really helped us help you in your journey to get to market faster. Today, as Stuart alluded to, I’ll be talking about embedded analytics, what is it defined, but also more importantly, how you can leverage it today to create new revenue streams.
Dawn Williams 02:29
I’m looking at what is embedded analytics? Simply said, data and analytics integrated seamlessly with the content or service being delivered to the end user.
Dawn Williams 02:40
What’s exciting is that I did some research, I’ve been in the business for a long time working with strategic partners to deliver enhanced solutions with analytics to their end clients. 90% of companies today are maximizing the use of data in every product and application they offer to end users eventually will be optimized with analytics. With external analytics, we’re at a 43% adoption rate and it’s proven that data driven organizations are 23 times more likely to add new customers with an external facing analytics, and six and a half times more likely to retain existing customers.
Dawn Williams 03:17
Another study with Aberdeen was noted that 41% of your competitors are launching these new analytical products over the next three years and we want to help you beat your competition and create that market differentiator before they do.
Dawn Williams 03:32
The next topic is around who is buying embedded analytics? What I did here was just look at the three main areas that I’ve seen.
Dawn Williams 03:43
External portals would be that entry level embedded analytics, where today you have a website, you may or may not have folks logging in. What you could do is provide those self-service analytics with role-based permissioning, so that they only see the data that you permit them to see and really get great insights. So that’s your External Portal and that’s an entry level use case.
Dawn Williams 04:06
We’re seeing companies that are actually delivering data as a service. A lot of times those are Solution Providers or information providers, but it really can be any company that has data because data is valuable and it can be monetized. Those solution providers are integrating the data within the product and then delivering it as a package service.
Dawn Williams 04:22
Then the final are Information Providers. That’s typically companies that have an application that today they’re delivering and they want to then now offer that premium version of application and they want to really move into self-service analytics. Later today, Chris will be demoing what that looks like.
Dawn Williams 04:40
The next one would be why embedded analytics? I alluded to the competitive advantage, getting a market differentiator, beating your competition.
Dawn Williams 04:49
For your customers, what a great opportunity for them to be in your platform longer. You can tell what they’re looking at, how long they’re looking at. You can start to build new new revenue opportunities with them and really gain actionable insights into your customers. That’s only going to lead to better relationships. Retaining your customers long-term creates that sticky relationship.
Dawn Williams 05:10
Then for you, yourself, obviously the value to your business is increasing engagement, the competitive advantage, additional revenue. These are kind of obvious, but also very important to mention.
Dawn Williams 05:21
Why Tableau? I’m going to share with you later a few use cases, and on our website, I actually put some links in the chat to some of the key areas I’d love for you, after this call to be able to go and research.
Dawn Williams 05:32
We’ve got some great customer references, where they’ve even offered to be a case study. I’ve got a couple of case studies, I’ll speak quickly to. But really, why Tableau? Building dashboards in hours, not days. Easy to customize. It integrate scaling flexibly. We have the opportunity today to team with XeoMatrix and Tableau as your trusted partner. I think that’s a big one.
Dawn Williams 05:54
There really are three key reasons why companies are embedding analytics. It’s one, to create valuable new customer experiences by integrating analytics into applications. To drive product adoption by empowering customers with analytics directly into their workflows, a seamless experience. They don’t have to leave the app or portal, they’re going to be in there longer. And then the third is to monetize data by transforming your proprietary data into differentiated and premium products and solutions. That’s where you’re going to end up really getting excited about XeoMatrix and Tableau.
Dawn Williams 06:30
This is interesting, In the past nine months that I’ve been focused on owning the number for all of North America, these are the key things I’m hearing over and over. What our clients, hopefully you’ve maybe read, this resonates with you what they want. This is what we listen to so we can not only, request new features or add to our roadmap, but we want to make sure we’re providing you the best of the best at all times. We’re focused on the analytics and we want you to focus on your core business.
Dawn Williams 06:59
What we’re hearing is streamline external reporting is very key. Building relationships with customers and partners. Building custom dashboards that are readily accessible to their growing customer base. Maintaining your brand, basically having that option to have that seamless experience with nowhere does the client know they’re even in Tableaum it’s seamless and your experience it’s white-labeled. Having that ability to interact and engage with customers from an automated perspective. I’ll talk about some of our feature enhancements that addresses that. Security, we all need to know that our data is protected, and our clients are only seeing the data that we want them to and with those valuable insights.
Dawn Williams 07:45
When I talk about Gartner, most everyone knows what that is, for 10 consecutive years, Tableau has been named a leader in Gartner. What that transcends to is our Chief Product Officer saying we want to continue to enhance our roadmap. In the last year alone, Salesforce has actually invested a lot of money. Our third imperative initiative is embedded analytics. Salesforce has made a lot of investments in Tableau. These are the ones I thought stood out to me in the last year.
Dawn Williams 08:17
We talked about security, elevated trust data at scale. We talked about the ability to have that increased AI, the Ask Data and Explain Data for all users is a great opportunity for you to provide the self-service analytics, where your end clients don’t have to be data scientists, they basically can get in there and get what they need by asking questions. They don’t even have to build a dashboard, it’s pretty exciting.
Dawn Williams 08:43
The fact that the Tableau Exchange, if you haven’t seen it, over 100 new Accelerators with pre-built content for tons of use cases in industry-specific even. I see we’ve got some healthcare companies today. You can go on there and not have to reinvent the wheel. I highly recommend leveraging those accelerators.
Dawn Williams 09:01
The last one, as you know, we’ve acquired Slack. Putting data first into the workflow. If any of you have in plans send leverage to Slack, now you can bring Tableau right into that experience.
Dawn Williams 09:16
I think this is interesting, because I’ve had this come up a great deal. We’re considering building this value added feature versus buy. There’s a cost, but there’s also a cost and key criteria to consider. People cost is a big one, but also time to market, flexibilities, scalability. The fact that Tableau is 100% focused on improving as I was sharing with the roadmap, our analytics platform for you. While you focus on your core business, we’re going to deliver you over and over again, that product roadmap that’s going to just continue to get better. Some of the things that are great is building and buying instead of building you’re going to achieve 20% faster time to market, 60% higher growth in cross-sell and up-sell revenue, and then double the improvement in customer renewal rates. We talked a little about that earlier. There’s some links, I put in the chat, which gives you the build versus buy article, and there’s a demo. If you go to that build versus buy link, it’s kind of nice because it’s, you’ll see not just what Tableau thinks, but you’ll also see the Aberdeen’s and the other outside groups. This actually was taken from the Aberdeen report.
Dawn Williams 10:22
I don’t want to take up all the time, because I know we want to get it to Chris, who’s actually going to show you everything, but I wanted to definitely point out a couple of customer wins. These are available on our website. This is a really recent win. I thought this was exciting, because this client, they didn’t really have an external analytics strategy. And then in three months, they were able to take their idea and deliver an MVP. Talk about fast time to market and now they are making an impact. Now they’re helping researchers quickly spot data anomalies and outliers that could lead to a major scientific breakthrough. They’re actually helping others. This is pretty exciting. You see the quote here by their data scientist.
Dawn Williams 11:11
The next two that I have are on our website, but there are full case studies. I like these two examples, but there’s like eight or nine. The Airlines Reporting Corp, the reason why that one is exciting, is because they’re embedding Tableau into six different BI products that they had prior. Now it’s part of their multimillion dollar additional revenue streams. That one is very cool to look at. That’s selling data and insights packaged as a service.
Dawn Williams 11:35
The final one is embedding within the product solution. Broadridge, financial was able to retain their customers, but offer some new, very valuable insights to their clients. That case study is also on our website.
Dawn Williams 11:47
That’s what I had in closing, again, all the links are in the chat. If you’d like to go research further, and I’m looking forward to hopefully speaking to you after this call. And Stuart, I’ll throw it back to you.
Chris Monahon 12:00
Awesome. Thanks, Dawn. So many awesome client use cases. They’re great. Our next speaker is Chris Monahon. Chris is the President of XeoMatrix. He has over 20 years of Data Analytics experience. Chris, I believe you were a web programmer back in the day, fun fact.
Chris Monahon 12:15
Yeah. I was during. Hello.
Stuart Tinsley 12:18
That’s awesome. Chris is going to be talking about Embedded Strategy and he’s going to be talking about the type of implementation options that are available. Chris, I’ll hand it off to you.
Chris Monahon 12:28
All right. Thanks, Stuart. Hi, everybody. My name is Chris Monahon, I’m the President of XeoMatrix. We’re a data and analytics firm based here in Austin, Texas. As Stuart mentioned, we’re a Gold Partner and we’re really active in the Tableau community. We offer a lot of TUG events here. As Stuart mentioned, also, I’ve 20 years of data warehouse and BI experience and used to be a web programmer back in the day. Embedded analytics is close and near and dear to my heart. We are a full service shop, but one of the specialties we have is in embedded analytics. We help organizations with the planning and deployment and adoption of embedded analytics.
Chris Monahon 13:07
Today, I’m going to talk to you guys about how do you go about crafting an embedded strategy?
Chris Monahon 13:12
First, we need to start by defining what does embedded mean. Embedded means a lot of things to different people. It could simply be a public facing website, it could be something as simple as maybe some internal wikis, or it could be something totally custom-built.
Chris Monahon 13:31
Today, I’m going to walk through five different implementation options, that you have. The first being simple web pages, public facing web pages, or internal. The second being how you integrate in third-party applications. We’ll talk about Hosted Tableau options. Then we’ll get into custom options around custom portals, as well as embedding in customer facing application.
Chris Monahon 13:58
When you start planning your embedded strategy, there’s several considerations that need to be discussed internally with your organization. First of all, who’s the end user? Is this an internal or external use case? Are you providing analytics to a broad set of internal sales team? Or is it more providing analytics to your end customers, or partners or suppliers? Is this going to be integrating into or embedding Tableau into something that currently exists today? Or is it a purely custom solution? Also, does branding matter? Is it going to be lightly branded? Or do you want a fully white-labeled solution like Dawn was referring to. When it comes to development and support, is this going to be done by your internal in house team or is this something that you need to outsource to a third-party. That factors into some of the costs. Who is going to be maintaining and supporting those?
Chris Monahon 14:54
When it comes to Tableau, you have two options. You can either host it on-prem in Tableau server or in the cloud. That’s a consideration that you also need to make. I’ll touch on that in a second. A lot of that depends on your security requirements. Upfront, before you start your implementation, you need to understand how you want to secure your data, and how you’re going to authenticate your users.
Chris Monahon 15:16
Let’s talk about the different methods of embedding. There’s two approaches you can take. One is embed code, which is simply embedding something with JavaScript or an iframe HTML tag. Or you can do API coding, which is programming. The embed code is extremely easy to set up, it’s literally copy and paste, I’ll show a couple of examples here. It’s super easy to maintain, and it’s a great quick solution. If you want something that’s a little more custom, white-labeled, and it’s gonna require some programming, you want to use the API. Tableau has three of them that you can use, the embedding. the JavaScript and the rest. You have several options there, but you have to keep in mind that it will require some maintenance, either by your internal team or by a third-party.
Chris Monahon 16:02
As I mentioned, you have two options when going with Tableau for embedded analytics. The first being Tableau Cloud, some of y’all might know it as Tableau Online, it’s now called Tableau Cloud. That’s a fully hosted solution where you don’t maintain the server, the servers are maintained by Tableau online, and there’s no maintenance required. It works fully with embedded implementations so it’s a great option. We see a lot of people going with this option. However, for those that want to have a little bit more control over their environment, maybe control of how often the upgrades are being performed, or maybe if you have some very strict data security requirements, because maybe you have some PII or something that legally contractually with your customers you need to keep in-house, then you have the option of Tableau Server. Both are great options, and both definitely have their advantages.
Chris Monahon 16:58
Let’s go ahead and walk through a couple of those implementation options that I mentioned. The first one I want to discuss is how to embed into simple web pages. This is a very popular use case that a lot of especially public facing websites might use. You might see blogs that embed Tableau.
Chris Monahon 17:21
In this case, I’m going to show you Redfin, which is obviously a popular broker that’s out there, that is embedding Tableau in their web pages. Let’s take a look at this example, and we’ll be sending these links out after the presentation as well. Here I’m on the Redfin data center, they have a page that provides all the public data that shows analytic around the housing market. As you scroll down, you can see they’ve embedded Tableau visualizations here using the embed code. This is interesting because this provides a lot of powerful analytic to the masses with just some simple embedding, and I’ll show you how it’s done here in a second. This particular visualization is interesting because it’s showing the new listings, you could all get right around what time this was around the start of the pandemic. What’s even more interesting is you can see how crazy the housing market was one year later. I think this one visualization alone is very interesting.
Chris Monahon 18:22
The way they went about it is I’ve set up a simple, basic website here, the free website, and I’m going to show an example of how to use the embed code. Here we have an Analytics tab that I’ve added here using the Wix website framework. I’m not going to go into details on how this was built, but I will show you how the embedding is done. You can see here, we’ve gone ahead and presented a simple dashboard on a blank page. The way we went about it was, you’ll notice here in the Wix Editor, that there’s an option here to edit embed code HTML. You’ll see on the left here, there’s some scripting that I’ve added, the way you go about getting the scripting is you can log in.
Chris Monahon 19:07
Right now, I’m showing you Tableau Cloud where I’ve published a couple of these demo dashboards. You can bring up your dashboard by simply clicking the Share button. The great thing is any user can have, with the proper credit permissions, can go ahead and do something like this, and post this. You can go ahead and copy this embed code, you go back to your editor, cut and paste this in here. Then if you save, and you have the Dashboard right there. That’s all there is to it. It’s simple cut and paste. This is a great option again, because it’s very powerful and a lot of users can use it. It’s simply easy to set up, there’s no development needed. If it’s a public facing dashboard, it simply shows the visualization right away. I will mention that one of the downsides of this that you have to consider is that there isn’t quite a seamless integration in this unless there’s some sort of single sign on or authentication behind the scenes. If that’s something you want, you might have to enable single sign on for maybe an internal use case of this.
Chris Monahon 20:13
The next option that I’ll walk through is third-party applications. Typically, these are applications that are internal to your organization. Think of like SharePoint, or other wiki or, or maybe Salesforce. The first example I’m going to walk through is integrating into a SharePoint portal. The nice thing about integrating into SharePoint and other wikis is that you’ve already spent time building an internal in-house community. One way to drive adoption in Tableau is to embed the dashboards directly within those wikis so that information is available, quickly accessible to whoever has access to those pages. It’s a real simple way to have quick adoption.
Chris Monahon 21:04
In this case, I’ve created a little demo site here in SharePoint. You can see we have a demo dashboard that’s embedded here. The way to go in and embed this is pretty easy to do within SharePoint. You click Edit on the page, simply come over here, and you’ll click the Embed edit feature right here. You’ll notice on the right hand side, there’s some iframe tag here where you embed the URL. Similar to the last example, you just go to your Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server, wherever the dashboard is published, and then you click on the share button. In this case, I’m not going to grab the embed code because it’s slightly different, I’ll touch on that in a sec. You want to grab the URL here that’s shared. And then if you go back here, you simply paste the URL into the iframe example. You’ll see here that also, you can control the height and width. You’ll notice that this is a pretty slick solution, it’s easy to do, and any user in your organization can do it. It’s very powerful and easy to use. One nice thing about it is that it’ll drive a lot of adoption within Tableau, and you already have people already in SharePoint, and there is no coding required. The only sort of drawback is that you have to know how to edit that iframe tag. But it’s as simple as a cut and paste, so it’s pretty cool.
Chris Monahon 22:37
In order to get that single sign on with all these embed code examples that I’m showing you, you have to have Active Directory or SSO so that integration takes place.
Chris Monahon 22:47
The next one I want to talk about is the third-party application use case with Salesforce. This is probably one of our number one most requested embed use cases. Everybody has either a sales team, support team, or just their organization in general, in Salesforce. With Salesforce being the parent company of Tableau, they have a very tight integration. I’m going to want to walk through a use case here around that. In order to embed in Salesforce with Tableau, you need to first install the Tableau Viz Lightning web components. You can have your admin, get it off the exchange, and install it. Then once installed, it’s available to embed or integrate anywhere within Salesforce.
Chris Monahon 23:36
I this particular example, I’m going to show you, let’s say I’m the sales rep. I have two accounts, in this case that pertain to me. I wanted to get information about these accounts. But yet, I don’t want to have to log into Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. I want to have it right at my fingertips right there in the workflow within within Salesforce. So in this case, I’ve gone ahead and I’ll show you sort of the how it’s done. And then I’ll show you how it was configured. In this case, I want to click on Ace Electronics. You’ll notice when it comes up, it’s gonna show a dashboard right there. It’s as easy as that. I have all this information available to me. It’s fully interactive, you can go ahead and click and do all the out of the box features that you have with Tableau.
Chris Monahon 24:27
When I go ahead and select my other account, you can see that it’s gone ahead and filtered, dynamically filtered this dashboard to only show the relevant information for the account HighTech. How did we go about doing that? We’re using the Tableau Viz Web Component. If you go here to edit, and you edit the page, and this would be an admin that can set this up for everybody or anyone with the proper permission. When you click over into edit mode, it’s going to bring up the Wizard Wix editor here. The idea is at the bottom, there is the Tableau Visualization Web Component at the bottom. Give it one second to load here. What you want to do is, I’ve already pre-configured it, but I’ll walk through sort of how it’s done. You take this web component, and you can just drag and drop it up here and specify what section of the page you want to put it. Then if you want to edit it, you click on the web component, and then on the right hand side, it’s going to give you a configuration option.
Chris Monahon 25:37
This is very similar to how we did the other two embeds. What you want to do is go to Tableau Online and click the Share button, grab the link to the dashboard that you want to use. The trick here is, we are going to go ahead and filter on account name. We want our account name to match what our customer name is on our dashboard. Just a little tip, you want to add a customer name filter here, and you create this mapping here in the Properties box saying the customer name should map to this Salesforce object, which is the account name. Once you do that, it simply passes that parameter when you’re clicking through the UI. This is a great way to do embedded analytics within Salesforce. No coding required. It provides analytics right there seamlessly within Salesforce. Your team doesn’t have to leave and go to Tableau Online or Tableau Server. The integration is easy using Tableau Viz Lightning Component.
Chris Monahon 26:46
You can filter on any object, not just account based on contacts or leads. You can build a story around all the different views within Salesforce. It’s super cool. Like all the other options, Active Directory, or SSO can be leveraged to have more of a single sign on experience.
Chris Monahon 27:05
The next one I want to talk about is Hosted Tableau. This is one, I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on this, because everyone has different ideas of what is embedded analytics. Sometimes they use it interchangeably for a SaaS solution, or simply providing analytics to a large customer base, maybe that they have. One out of the box, Tableau is great for that.
Chris Monahon 27:30
If you take a look at, I’ll go ahead and log into our Tableau online account here, you can see that the default landing view of Tableau Cloud is already a portal. It is wonderfully designed and easy to navigate. We find that there’s a lot of our clients that start off with this approach. Many of them actually stay on this approach too because there’s a lot of benefits to this. One, there’s no development or customization required, you can do some light branding, and what they found too, is that a lot of their partners or customers already use Tableau. They’re very familiar with the interface, they get it. In fact, they’re proud and pleasantly surprised to find that they see the value of Tableau and they’re happy that their customers are using it as well.
Chris Monahon 28:21
Ccustomers really value that this is powered by Tableau. We’ve seen a lot of increased adoption in that regard. I would say, if you go this route, it’s a great way to get faster adoption with your client base. There’s no developer resources required, and the administration, maintenance, and support, will be very low. Keep that in mind as an option if you don’t want to go the fully customized look and feel.
Chris Monahon 28:51
The last two that I’ll touch on here are custom solutions. These are fully custom, they’re developed by our development teams there. These are some demos that we’ve created.
Chris Monahon 29:02
The first one I’m going to touch on is custom web portal. This is a franchisee portal that we’ve developed and you can see here that it doesn’t look like Tableau. If you didn’t know is Tableau, you probably couldn’t tell and that’s the idea. Is meant to be seamless and provide a very white-labeled looking feel. If you go to our website, again, I’ll send these links out. We have a link at the top for demo. We have three of them: a franchisee portal, a vendor portal, and a broker portal.
Chris Monahon 29:38
Let me go to the franchisee portal that I mentioned. Everything here is built using a wrapper essentially for the portal. We have a React front-end with a Java back-end for those of you that are technical. What we’ve done is we provided this is really just to demonstrate the art of the possible. A lot more customization obviously could be done with this, but the idea is that everything in this gray space is going to be Tableau. Everything here is going to be Tableau. It’s going to be the reports, obviously, you can toggle through the different reports that come up.
Chris Monahon 30:22
You maintain this as any other dashboard within Tableau. The blue bar at the top is going to be your navigation. You can toggle between the dashboards here, you can integrate filters. This is a custom filter that we’ve built is not within Tableau, and it’s talking back to the dashboard. You can add additional features like exporting to excel, exporting the PDF. All these are custom objects that are built within the portal wrapper itself and they talk back to Tableau. This is using the embedded API. Depending on how much code and customization you want to do, depends how far you want to take this. One tip I will mention is that some of this customization could be pushed in theory to the dashboard. In fact, parts of this could be built as a dashboard and we’ve actually implemented solutions like that as well. But for the sake of just demos, you can see how you can interact with the dashboard.
Chris Monahon 31:28
The powerful thing about this is that you don’t have to build your visualizations using d3 or any other sort of libraries, you can have that speed to market that Dawn was talking about, the maintenance and creating new dashboards. You don’t have to go back to your dev team.
Chris Monahon 31:44
We’ve had a lot of clients who actually have existing portals, convert everything over to Tableau for that exact reason. It’s a completely customized experience. When it’s white-labeled your customers never have to leave the portal, it’s a seamless integration, especially the sign on as well. It accelerates your development and lowers your maintenance costs. We’ve seen a lot of upselling, monatization around having Tableau embedded. You’re providing powerful analytics, as Dawn alluded to there, they can work with you and explain some of the monetization options that you have with it.
Chris Monahon 32:24
We’ve seen is that a lot of customers, your customers probably asked for web edit capabilities. That’s something that you can charge as sort of an upsell opportunity to your clients and help monetize at any cost to Tableau. It will require some development, obviously, so you’ve got to factor that in. It is a very powerful, compelling solution.
Chris Monahon 32:48
The last one is sort of similar, rather than just simply a portal, a lot of people have customer facing applications that they build on the web. Here’s an example that we have, this is a broker portal or application, the idea is that a lot of brokers login to find their information, their opportunities.
Chris Monahon 33:12
I’ll switch over to the demo itself and login here. Here’s a login and you can check these out on the web, we have the logins right underneath the username and passwords right underneath the login screen. When you log in, it’s going to bring up your Tableau dashboard. The Tableau dashboard is everything below this white toolbar here. Everything else is around navigation. We have the navigation up here, you can change the look and feel. Here we have a hamburger menu to showcase exporting in PDF and Excel. You can add web edit button here as well. One nice thing about this, just showcasing what’s possible, this could be taken as far as you want. We added a filtering capability here so instead of the drop down filter, like we had in the last example, we’re using images to filter. These are talking back to the Tableau dashboard using the embedded API. This creates a very compelling, seamless integration solution using Tableau.
Chris Monahon 34:24
The benefits are very similar to a custom portal as well so I won’t review these again, but I would emphasize down at the bottom here, I put a tip that, in our experience, when we do this, we advise clients on how far do you want to take the customization. If it’s required that needs to be totally seamless, then definitely take your things like your filters or your button and move those out of Tableau into your into your GUI. If it’s something where it’s not as as important and you feel like it might be more maintenance down the road that you don’t want to do, you can move the navigation or whatnot, into the actual Tableau dashboard, itself, and leverage Tableau for its capabilities, and other phases of maintenance on the coding side. That’s just a little tip.
Chris Monahon 35:16
Sort of wrapping up here, I want to talk about, as you’re working and crafting your embedded strategy, take time to plan and think of all the different scenarios that I outlined here. You need to identify the embedded use case, who is your user? Is this going to be internal or external? How much custom development and maintenance do you really want to support? Will your development support be in-house or third-party. When it comes to selecting your option for Tableau, you have two great options. It’s either on-prem or in the cloud. That really depends on sort of your security and data requirements. I would spend extra time because everybody knows data is important, understand your data and security requirements up front. That’ll make your integration and your architecture design a lot easier.
Chris Monahon 36:06
That’s the end of my presentation. If you are interested in trying, doing a trial of Tableau embedded, please reach out to your account executive or reach out to me, we’re offering a two hours of free consultation just to help you sort of understand the options we can talk through to do a planning session or workshop to discuss embedded strategy and any recommended options that are available to you. We can talk about the architecture and security design and even help you kick off a trial if you want to. In our experience, trials don’t have to take a lot of time. I think like Dawn said, some people even got implementations up in a couple of weeks. In our experience, a really good web developer can get a proof of concept up in less than a day. I’s real easy to trial Tableau, we’d be happy to walk you through the options. Feel free to reach out. With that. I’ll turn it back over to you, Stuart.
Stuart Tinsley 37:03
Awesome. Thank you, Chris. That was great. So many ways to embed, so many ways. Awesome. We’ll take time now for Q&A. We’ll have about 15 minutes and please feel free to chat any questions that you have, or there’s also a Q&A option that you can submit questions, privately. We’ll wait for some questions to come in here. Thanks again, to our our panelists, Chris, Dawn, thank you.
Stuart Tinsley 37:32
We did have a question come in on the Q&A. Chris, this might be a good question for you. What is the typical implementation time for an embedded engagement or project?
Chris Monahon 37:45
Yeah, that’s a good question. Yeah, I touched on it briefly there at the end. But I would say, in our experience we’ve seen depending on which implementation option you’re going with, some of them are as short as a week, some of the custom ones we’ve seen turned around in a week or two. And then, of course, some of the larger ones that are fully hosted, or white-label, I should say, maybe taking, a month or so just depending on how much customization you’re wanting to do. I hate to say it varies, but it’s relatively quick.
Stuart Tinsley 38:21
Gotcha. All right. Another question coming in as well. Okay, so this one is, how do we set up the user integration between our web portal and Tableau server?
Chris Monahon 38:38
Okay, yeah, sure. There’s a couple of different ways. There’s actually two methods that we use in Tableau server. There’s the concept of the prior method used was using trusted authentication and that’s simply Tableau establishes a trust between your application server and Tableau Server itself. When your application server makes a request on behalf of a customer, it returns a ticket. That ticket is redeemable and returned to the user that could then render their dashboards when they go to redeem that ticket. In a similar concept, with the newer versions of Tableau and Tableau Online, they use the concept of connected apps, which is a JSON web token. It follows JWT standard. Tableau online or Tableau server, there’s a there’s a shared secret, which is then signed by your application server, and that’s used for the communication. There’s, there’s couple different options, but we’re happy to walk through it with whoever asked that question. Reach out.
Stuart Tinsley 39:48
Cool, we have one more that came, Does Tableau support SAML?
Chris Monahon 39:53
Yes, definitely. It doesn’t have to be with embedded. Many different SAML options are on Tableau Online, I mean, they’re all out of the box. You can Okta, Azure AD, I mean, there’s a huge list of them. I will include that there’s a great tech note on the different options around that. Depending on which one you want, there’s also a list of how to do it for each one. I’ll provide that in the list of links that we want to send out after the presentation. And if you do, I would say it takes maybe an hour or less to set up.
Stuart Tinsley 40:37
Yeah, yep. Okay, well, we’re just came in as well. What are the recommendations for either deploying multi tenant or single site?
Chris Monahon 40:46
That’s a great question. When we talk multi tenant, we talked about having a Tableau site where all your customers are going to have their data, or their they log into one site to access the dashboards. There’s a lot of benefits of doing that, versus having multiple sites for each one of your customers. One, you can also think about scalability and maintenance. If you have 100, or even 1000 customers, then managing all those sites can be fairly difficult. But typically, we recommend a multi tenant approach where you build, you have one site, we build a dashboard once, and then we leverage what they call row level security, which basically, when the dashboards rendered at at runtime, it then only displays the data that current customer is allowed to see. You can build one dashboard that supports multiple customers. That’s the most common approach we’ve seen. You can do multi site. Usually, when we see that it’s because maybe there’s some strict data requirements, where you have to keep that data siloed or separate, and you can’t mix users. That’s usually the only time we see that.
Stuart Tinsley 42:00
Yeah. Another question came in, is Tableau Cloud a seamless experience with embedding compared to Tableau Server? It’s a really good question timely.
Chris Monahon 42:11
Yes, it is. They’re the same, that’s the great part about it. Behind the scenes it’s just serving up the dashboard and how you render that is however, you use the API, but using connected apps, is going to be the same experience to the users.
Stuart Tinsley 42:31
Awesome. I think that’s all the questions I’m seeing. Let me double check. Yeah, any other questions? Please feel free to use the chat or Q&A. We just have one come in. What common technologies do you host Tableau server in?
Chris Monahon 42:58
I guess technology, like platforms? Like AWS platform or Azure? Yeah, it’s Azure, AWS, Google Cloud are the typical ones we do. A lot more AWS, obviously, because they’re one of the leaders, but yes all of them are fully supported.
Stuart Tinsley 43:17
Cool. Okay, yeah. I don’t see any other questions. Yeah, thanks, everyone for joining. Thanks to our panelists, Dawn, and Chris. These are great presentations. Just to recap, what will come out after this webinar, we’ll have a recording, we’ll have some really important links here as well. Some of Chris’s demos and the links that Dawn had and at XeoMatrix, we are offering two hours of consultation that talk strategy around embedded. We would love to talk to you. This is a super powerful element and component to Tableau. Please reach out to us with any questions and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much.
Stuart Tinsley 44:04
Thank you, everyone. Bye, everyone.
