Pretty much everyone reading this will be aware of what Tableau is. Perhaps you've got desktop installed on your PC, or have been using Tableau Public to play around with data and show off some cool dashboards. However, unless you're part of a large organisation or have undergone some training to do with analytics then there's a high chance that you've not heard of Tableau Server.
In short, the product allows you to host all of your organisation's data in one, centralised location. This ultimately provides a one-stop-shop where analysts, account managers and stakeholders can log in, find what they need and carry on with their business. Servers can contain a number of sites, which in turn can host multiple projects. Within these projects we can store a number of useful items such as published workbooks, entire dashboards and even data sources that others can then plug into and use. One thing to note is that, within the same site, items can interact with each other i.e. a workbook using data from a data set within another project. However, this operability is lost between sites on a server.
From the back-of-a-stamp explanation I've provided above, you may be thinking that this would leave your data vulnerable to anyone with server access, especially if you handle sensitive or valuable material. However, thanks to user types, groups and custom permission settings, we can very easily limit what is visible for each user, as well as their capabilities if they are granted access. Thankfully, the level of granularity within permission settings allows for very robust and versatile controls. For example, we can employ different rules to various parts of the same project i.e. data sets, workbooks, flows (from Tableau Prep) and so on. Within these components, we can also break down capabilities to individual activities i.e. editing, filtering and publishing. Finally, user types very simply define what each person can do within the working environment. For example, members given 'creator' are able to build and publish, whereas those assigned as a 'viewer' can only do just that. Anyone wanting to utilise Server should think carefully about what they need it for as the price points vary pretty significantly between these tiers.
Overall, Tableau Server is a super powerful and valuable tool for consolidating a range of work within an organisation. The product itself (assuming it is configured properly!) makes for a very smooth, future-proof process when it comes to management and governance of data. That said, much like anything in life, there are always downsides. Running into issues like the server going down or licenses expiring can cause a single point of failure which may have bottleneck effects if too many processes use or rely on this down the line.