What is a Project?
In Tableau Server, a project is a collection of related workbooks shared with a defined audience.
A Tableau Desktop user (with the appropriate permissions) can publish visualizations to a project.
When you request a project, you will be asked to provide the following.
- Project name and description
- Project type (see below)
- Tableau Creators who can publish to the project
- Name of the project administrator(s):
- Each Tableau Server project will have one or more project administrators.
- Usually the project administrator is the primary publisher for the project. However, it can be all publishers or some project publishers.
- Responsibilities:
- manage project security via Brown Groups
- field questions from users you give access to your content as well as users interested in viewing your content
- appear on the Tableau Server Projects knowledge base article
- Optional: List of users who can view the project (you can set viewers later after the project is created).
If you need to share content with users who represent a Workday supervisory organization team, we can help you leverage a group that automatically synchronizes with Workday hires/terminations for that team.
Project Types
There are two types of projects, depending on the intended audience.
Project Type | Audience | Project Naming Convention | Example Project |
Organizational unit | Users who belong to the same department or team | The project name should match the name that describes the organizational unit. | Office of Institutional Research |
Cross functional | Users who come from various departments and teams and cannot be defined by an organizational unit. For example, a committee. | The project name should be descriptive of the content it will contain. | Faculty Activity |
Locked Project Permissions
We use groups to manage project permissions because it is a best practice.
Project content permissions are locked by default. This means when you publish to Tableau Server, you cannot override the project's group permissions and assign permissions to individual users.
Exceptions to Locked Projects
There are two exceptions where projects are unlocked and we allow the publisher to set permissions when publishing content.
- Each project has a 'WIP' sub folder for work in progress. WIP sub folders are shared with the project publishers by default and permissions are unlocked. This allows the publisher to specify which users have permission to the content for testing and feedback purposes. The intention of a WIP project is to share works in progress with a subset of a viewer group for feedback, so publishers have more flexibility to choose who sees what in this type of project. Publishers can leverage the Viewer group in this project or share content with individual users.
- You need to share content with varying individuals and the overhead of creating and maintaining individual projects and a Viewer group doesn't make sense.
Example:
Institutional Research creates one-time visualizations for various users—sometimes one viz for one or two people. It doesn't make sense to create the overhead of a project and security groups for a single visualization. Their team has an unlocked project for this purpose.
If you have a project with unlocked permissions, we recommend you grant the same set of permissions to individuals that we grant to Viewer groups.
Need a project with unlocked permissions?
Contact the Business Intelligence Team to discuss unlocking your project permissions.