Learn About Site Admin Tasks

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Manage site users and groups.
  
• Create projects for organizing site content.
  
• Leverage schedules for extract refreshes, subscriptions, and flows.
  
• Access dashboards for monitoring site activity.
  

Introduction to Tableau Site Admins

You’ve learned about Tableau Server admins, but your organization needs another high-level admin: a site admin. In small organizations, the same person or team might have both server admin and site admin roles, but in larger organizations, the roles often diverge. At a high level, site admins are responsible for their respective site(s), permissions, content, and users. They make sure users in their organization can share and explore visualizations on a Tableau Server site. They’re similar to server admins, except they only have unrestricted access to the sites they administer.

What Is a Site?

As a reminder, a site is a collection of users, groups, and content that’s walled off from other groups and content on the same instance of Tableau Server. All content (workbooks, projects, data sources, and so forth) is published, managed, and accessed on a site-by-site basis.

As a site admin, you have access to these pages on each Tableau site you administer.

Here you can manage the site’s users, groups, schedules, jobs, and tasks, as well as monitor the site status.

Let’s take a look at these site admin responsibilities in more detail.

Manage Users and Groups

Site admins manage users for their site by going to the Users page from the Navigation pane.

By default, as a site admin, you can add and remove users on any site you’re an admin of (unless a server admin revokes that capability). With this privilege, you can edit a user account as long as you have access to all of the sites that user is a member of.

Similarly, you can manage groups by going to the Groups page. 

Server admins can manage users and groups too, but they have access to all users and groups across the server. Site admins are responsible for users and groups at the site level.

Manage Content and Permissions

In addition to managing users and groups, site admins are usually also responsible for managing content on the site.

This includes creating projects for organizing content, as well as assigning permissions to allow users (groups) access to specific content. 

Project-Level Permissions

As a site admin (or server admin), you can add or remove top-level projects on a site, and move published content from one project to another. A project is like a folder used to organize content (workbooks, views, data sources, and so on) within a site on Tableau Server. You can use projects to delegate content management to project leaders, to make your site easier for self-service users to navigate, and to manage users’ access to workbooks published to your site.

One way to create a project is to go to the Explore page, and then click New | Project.

Content-Level Permissions

You can also set permissions on individual content, as long as project content permissions are customizable. To set permissions on the content level, go to the content, click , then click Permissions.

We recommend you manage and lock permissions at the project level. This prevents users from changing permissions at the content level and causing confusion over who can access what.

We won’t go into more detail now, but you can learn more about how to set Tableau Server permissions here.

Work with Schedules, Jobs, and Tasks

As a site admin (or server admin), you can also access the Schedules, Jobs, and Tasks pages from the Navigation pane. 

• The Schedules page is where you run the schedules for your site’s extract refreshes, subscriptions, and flows.
  
• The Tasks page is where you can see each scheduled item, known as a task.
  
• The Jobs page is where you can track unique instances of tasks that have been initiated.
  

Monitor Site Activity

The last page site admins have access to is the Site Status page. Here you’ll see embedded Tableau dashboards to help you monitor site activity.

Now you know just a few of the things you can do as a site admin for Tableau Server. Next, you discover what end users can do with Tableau Server.

Resources

• Tableau eLearning: Site Admin Learning Path (Sign-in required)
  
• Tableau Help: Site Settings Reference
  
• Tableau Help: Manage Individual Sites
  
• Tableau Help: Permissions