A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to work a Tableau booth at Salesforce's Annual Conference, Dreamforce. I found the experience invigorating as customers gushed with excitement over the idea of embedding Tableau into Salesforce. That's right, if you are looking to embed rich analytics directly into your CRM, then this will be worth a quick read.
Tableau is a Salesforce customer, and we make no secret of it. In fact, our CDO and co-founder, Dr. Chris Stolte wrote an article about how we use it back in 2008. At that time, (before Tableau had native connectivity directly to Salesforce data) Salesforce recommended pulling data from the cloud into a local data warehouse to report off of. We use Forceamp to do this and then use Tableau for analytics on top of that. For some customers this is still a good strategy for a variety of reasons
Since Tableau 8 was released over 2 years ago, we have provided native connectivity directly to Salesforce from Tableau. I have seen challenges here and there given that our connector must adhere to the limitations proposed when querying through the Salesforce API. Our first connector used the SFDC v26 API, while Tableau 9 now uses v30 for much better performance.
Whether your data resides in Salesforce or other cloud sources, local databases or flat files, Tableau can connect to all of that data and make it actionable within a framework that is already familiar. Imagine being able to see the 'hot' leads your marketing team is generating, your support tickets that are being actively worked, your customer's historic spend, and your closed business vs. quota all in one place. Well imagine no more, because this is a reality for our sales teams and other Tableau customers that have embedded Tableau Dashboards back into Salesforce!
There are multiple points of integration with differing levels of complexity. I've embedded Tableau Dashboards into VisualForce pages using iframes, embedded using the Salesforce Canvas framework, and even embedded Tableau Dashboards into Salesforce1 (mobile app).
Interested? Well if you would like to learn more, check out Embedding Sales Analytics with Salesforce Canvas, Embedding into Salesforce1 using Tableau on-premise or Tableau Online in the Cloud!, and the Salesforce Canvas adapter toolkit, complete with examples and documentation. Stay tuned for future articles on the nitty-gritty.
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