Tableau Conference

Tableau Conference21 was held last December 10-12, 2021. It’s an annual event that Tableau announces its product roadmap and many users gather around the world. There are a hundred of educational sessions and hands-on learnings.

According to this opening keynote, their product road map was introduced and divided into four areas. These are the following:

• Analytics Everywhere
• Collaborative & Accessible
• Bussiness Science
• Trusted Data at Scale

I've thought that continuous updates based on customer issues and demands are the important reasons why many users loves and supports Tableau. Not only by solving current user issues and answering their request, I can see some potential investments to acquire new customers such as challenge of Business Science and improvement of connectivity to Slack and Salesforce group product.

I would like to introduce the functions that got my attention:

1. "Ask Data" through Slack UI by typing a question.

In this conference, many new integrations between slack and tableau were announced, but , I was suprised by most of it. We can share a data to Slack already. As a next step, when asking a question to the shared Tableau data in Slack, Tableau will be able to automatically reply to the question. It means “Ask data” was impremented on the Slack conversation interface. Moreover, I thought it would be a good innovation, we will need to design data source and field name more recognizable for people except engineer and data scientist. Furthermore, I have observed that the "Ask Data" function is not optimized for Japanese. It's may be difficult but it would be grateful if Tableau improve this.

2. Tableau Exchange

Market place for extension and connector already exists. At Tableau Exchange we can share data source and dashboard sample more over. Tableau didn't depends on specific dataset but Salesforce has common data structure such as customer organization and transaction. Sharing dashboard sample is good in terms of integration with Salesforce.

3. Business Science

The announce of Business Science means that update Tableau’s position as self service of data visualization to self service of business prediction.

4. Prep Extension

To visualize data, we need to prepare our data in advance. Until now, They released Tableau Prep to enable us to prepare the data by GUI without coding and SQL skills. Prep Extension enable developer to make and share custom functions to integrate with other application and data. I thought business area we can use Tableau Prep will expand.

5. Virtual Connector

I think Virtual Connector is very good solution for data access management. The concept making VirtualConnecter for each organization and business role is very easy to understand and simplify the data management. I think simplycity is very important about operation of security management. so, I think Virtual Connector will be a popular function.