Review Site Admin Responsibilities
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the responsibilities of site admins.
- Explain the difference between Tableau data stewards and site administrators.
- Describe site users and groups.
- Understand site best practices.
What Are the Essential Responsibilities of Site Administrators?
As a Tableau Cloud site admin, you’re most likely a member of your organization’s IT team. If your organization doesn’t have a formal IT team, you might be an accidental admin, a savvy Tableau user who takes on this important role. Either way, you play a critical role in managing your site.
You’re responsible for completing a set of essential tasks that are critical to establishing and maintaining the framework that your organization uses to access and manage data. These tasks include:
- Creating an organizational structure
- Managing end user permissions
- Adding and managing end users
- Monitoring site activity
- Refreshing data
For an overview of a Tableau Cloud site admin’s job, check out the Tableau Cloud Help.
What’s the Difference Between Data Managers and Site Admins?
Unlike most site admins who manage the site itself, data managers are responsible for the creation and publication of data sources to Tableau Cloud. When data managers publish data sources to Tableau Cloud, other users on your site can then build workbooks to explore and share their data.
In some organizations, the site admin and the data manager might be the same person. However, for the purpose of this module, we focus specifically on the responsibilities of the site admin. For more information about the data manager’s tasks, see Publish Data Sources and Workbooks.
Navigating to Admin Areas of a Site
As a site admin, you have access to certain areas of the site that other users cannot see or get to. These areas include pages for managing users, groups, schedules, and monitoring the site status.
Configure Site Settings
Site admins can customize a site for their organization. Customizing a site may include everything from adding a unique logo to help users identify your site, to configuring site settings based on your organization’s requirements and needs. Adding a custom logo is a good first step for learning about options for customizing your site. You can also set a default start page for your users as a way to get familiar with the steps for site configuration.
Manage Users and Groups
Site admins add, manage, and remove site users on the Users page. Once users exist, groups make it easy to manage user role assignments and setting access to content. Assign permissions to groups and add users to groups based on the content they need access to. For example, create Sales and Marketing to hold users with specific content needs.
By creating groups and always establishing permissions at the group level, user access management is as easy as adding or removing them from the relevant groups.
Manage Content, Permissions, and Projects
In addition to managing users and groups, site admins are responsible for managing content on the site. This includes determining the project structure for organizing content and whether or not permissions are consistent at the project level or customizable.
About Projects
Projects function as both a way to manage content permissions and as an organizational and navigational framework. Create a project structure that allows for logical permissioning and also makes it easy for users to find content.
About Permissions
Permissions consist of rules that are applied to content and determine who can access the content. Permissions include things like the ability to see content, publish into a specific project, access web editing functionality, or leave comments.
Project-Level Permissions
As a site admin, you can add or remove top-level projects on your site. A project is a folder used to organize content (workbooks, views, data sources, dashboards and more) within a site. You can move published content from one project to another and use projects to delegate content management to project leaders. If you organize your projects well, it’s easier for users to navigate and for you to manage users’ access to content published on your site.
Content-Level Permissions
You can also set permissions on individual items such as workbooks and data sources, but this can become unmanageable quickly.
We recommend you manage and lock permissions at the project level. This prevents inconsistent permissions at the content level and confusion about who can access what.
Best Practices for Site Admins
As a site admin, you manage the content and your users. Planning ahead helps you make the most of the site and provide the best support for your users and their content. Follow these best practices to maximize value from the site.
- Plan: Plan how you’ll use the site and create a framework of projects, groups, and permissions for the site before adding users. This minimizes changes after the users have been added to the site.
- Organize: Use the Default project as a template to create new projects. Leverage features such as nested projects, non-admin project leaders, and locking permissions to simplify permission management.
- Permissions: Control permissions at the project level, not by individual content item. Assign permissions for groups, not individual users.
- Monitor: Monitor use of your site, and performance of data sources, workbooks, extract refreshes.
Plan Your Site
In order to organize the site for efficient daily use, know how your users will use the site before you add them. Create groups for users who need the same permissions to avoid managing permissions individually.
Organize User Content with Projects
Create projects for your users to store content. Projects simplify delegating content management to project leaders who are familiar with and understand the content. Projects also make navigation easier for users by dividing the site into different logical containers. Projects can be hidden from groups who don't need them, simplifying navigation for all users.
Manage Permissions
Permissions determine what content users can access and how they can interact with that content. Permission management is easiest when you set permissions for groups, not users, and when projects are well-organized. Locking permissions at the level of the project, rather than individual content items, ensures consistency and predictability of access.
Monitor Site Use
Monitoring site use helps you understand if users are having problems signing into the site and make it possible to address problems if any exist. It can also give you details about data usage like traffic to live data source connections and tasks run on extracts on the site.
Recap
In this unit, you learned that:
- A Tableau Cloud site admin is responsible for creating and organizing the site’s structure, managing user access to the site and its content, and monitoring site activity. A data manager is usually responsible for the creation and publication of data sources to the site.
- Special navigation options grant site administrators access to restricted areas of the site, allowing them to customize the site, manage users, groups and schedules, and monitor site status.