Tableau Cloud Manual Migration Guide

You are in the Tableau Cloud Manual Migration Guide.(Link opens in a new window) This guide describes how to manually migrate Tableau Server deployments with fewer than 100 users to Tableau Cloud.

This topic walks you through two important planning tasks you should complete before migrating: your data connectivity strategy and establishing your authentication mechanism. You can find a summarised list of the feature differences in the Tableau Server help topic, Technical Considerations for Migrating from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud (Windows(Link opens in a new window) | Linux(Link opens in a new window)). Run the Tableau Cloud Migration Technical Readiness Assessment to understand if there are any use cases that may need to be adapted before migrating to Tableau Cloud.

Learn about Tableau Cloud

If you are new to Tableau Cloud, we recommend that you learn more about the platform by signing up for a self-guided course(Link opens in a new window) online. These courses can serve as an introduction to Tableau Cloud and will give you some context as you plan your migration.

If you are familiar with administering Tableau Server today, you’ll find that many of your tasks are largely the same in Tableau Cloud. With the move to Tableau Cloud though, tasks related to deploying and managing the software will be handled by Tableau as a managed service. You can leave the upgrades to us. Head to the blog post, Should I Move My Analytics to Tableau Cloud?(Link opens in a new window) for more details. With Tableau Cloud, you will be able to focus more of your energy on ensuring smooth data connectivity, equipping users with best practices and developing an analytics community. For more details about what managing a Tableau Cloud site involves, as well as a bunch of resources to get you started as an administrator, visit the Tableau Cloud Site Admin(Link opens in a new window) page.

Planning your data strategy for Tableau Cloud

Tableau Cloud can connect to dozens of data sources, but it’s essential that you develop a data connectivity plan before you begin a migration. In this section we’ll walk you through the best way to do that, and we'll describe the two ways Tableau Cloud connects to data.

The goal at this point is to validate that you can support your current data requirements after your migration to Tableau Cloud.

Cleaning house: Does your content give you joy?

Before you begin to evaluate the various data types and how you'll migrate all of your data sources, workbooks and projects into Tableau Cloud, we recommend that you use this migration as an opportunity to do some house cleaning. Most organisations running Tableau Server for more than a year or two collect some amount of stale content: workbooks, data sources, projects and flows. We recommend taking these steps before you migrate:

• You can use the Stale Content (Windows(Link opens in a new window) | Linux(Link opens in a new window)) admin view in Tableau Server to identify content that is no longer in use. It doesn't usually make sense to move ancient, archived content to Tableau Cloud. Let it go!
• Like most organisations who have been running Tableau Server for a while, your content hierarchy and permission structure has probably "evolved" organically and probably a bit messily. As you plan the migration, develop a strategy that will optimise project, group and permissions structures in your new Tableau Cloud site.
• If you are a Tableau Data Management customer, use the tools to manage data cleaning, combining and processing for the pending move.

Make a list and create a data source strategy

After you clean up existing content, it's time to take inventory of your data sources. The goal of this exercise is to determine how you will support users in your organisation with the data sources that they are currently using.

For each data source:

• Cross check it with the Tableau Cloud connector table in the following section. If it's supported, you've got a direct path forward. If it's not in the table...
• Cross check it with Connectivity with Bridge to determine if your data type is supported by Tableau Bridge.
• If the data source is a static file, Tableau Cloud supports uploading Excel or text-based data sources (.xlsx, .csv, .tsv) directly from the browser or Tableau Desktop. The maximum file size you can upload is 1 GB. More likely, your users are connecting to these types of files in a shared, common directory. If this is the case, you can upload these files to a public cloud space such as Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, for example. Or you can use Bridge. You (or your users) can then configure Tableau Cloud to connect to these spaces for a live data connection.
• Run the Tableau Cloud Migration Technical Readiness Assessment to understand if there are any use cases that may need to be adapted before migrating to Tableau Cloud.

Supported Tableau Cloud connectors

The following connectors are supported in Tableau Cloud

*For more information about using OAuth 2.0 standard for Google BigQuery, OneDrive and Dropbox connections in Tableau Cloud, see OAuth Connections(Link opens in a new window).

**Teradata web authoring currently doesn’t support query banding functionality. See Teradata(Link opens in a new window) for details.

‡Supports virtual connections if you have Data Management. See About Virtual Connections and Data Policies(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Cloud help for details.

§Tableau Cloud doesn't support SSL using Google Cloud SQL.

User accounts and authentication

The second essential planning step is to identify the authentication mechanism you would like to use for Tableau Cloud users.

The default user account on Tableau Cloud is called TableauID. TableauID requires multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure secure access to Tableau Cloud. See About multi-factor authentication and Tableau Cloud(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Cloud documentation.

If your organisation uses an identity provider (IdP) to enable authentication, you can probably use that for Tableau Cloud. We support Salesforce authentication and Google OpenID natively. You can also configure SAML for Azure, Okta, OneLogin, AD FS, PingOne or any IdP that supports standard SAML 2.0 authentication.

Before you proceed, review the Tableau Cloud Authentication(Link opens in a new window) options to develop a plan.

If your organisation manages identities with Azure AD, Okta or OneLogin, then you can also automatically provision users and groups in Tableau Cloud. See Automate User Provisioning and Group Synchronisation through an External Identity Provider(Link opens in a new window).