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For migrations to be smoothly supported by TabMove and eligible for self-service with TabMove Lite, several criteria apply. The criteria are listed below, and we recommend you evaluate those carefully while considering whether TabMove Lite is the correct solution, or whether your environment necessitates a more controlled approach with the migration delivered as a service.

Eligibility Criteria

Limits

Upper limits for various “measures” have been defined to ensure a sufficiently fast and reliable migration can take place. These apply to the current Tableau Server environment that you’re looking to migrate:

  • Maximum of 250 users.

  • Maximum of 5 sites. Note that you can still use TabMove Lite when your Tableau Server has more than 5 sites, but only 5 of those can effectively be migrated.

  • Maximum of 50 GB of content.

These limits are enforced by TabMove Lite at run time.

Tableau Server

Various criteria pertaining to Tableau Server are defined to ensure optimal circumstances for a migration. Failure to meet these requirements would greatly reduce the success rate of a migration.

Connectivity

By far the most important requirement, is that TabMove Lite must be able to connect to Tableau Server. Depending on where TabMove Lite is deployed, the approach may vary.

  • If Tableau Server is already reachable from the internet, no action needs to be taken.

  • If Tableau Server is hosted on a VPC with a common cloud service provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), installing the application from their Marketplace “into” the VPC is the way to go (to be documented).

  • Otherwise, options for some specific form of whitelisting to enable connectivity should be considered.

Moreover, Tableau Server must have be correctly configured to use HTTPS (as opposed to insecure HTTP).

Version

The absolute minimum Tableau Server version to use TabMove Lite is set to version 2020.4. TabMove Lite relies on specific functionalities of Tableau Server to make the migration process as smooth as possible. As versions before 2020.4 lack these functionalities, a more tailored approach that TabMove Lite can not offer is required, and a full TabMove migration engagement with Biztory could be considered. Alternatively, first upgrading Tableau Server and then using TabMove Lite could be an acceptable approach as well.

Note that migrating Custom Views requires at least version 2023.3 due to the fact that newer API endpoints are required to obtain the Custom Views' definitions.

Data Sources and Connections

General Data Source Considerations

Connectivity to data sources used with Tableau should be completely reviewed and planned before starting the migration. If Tableau uses cloud-based data sources exclusively (e.g. Snowflake, Google Drive, BigQuery, …) this is usual trivial and requires little to no additional effort.

If Tableau connects to one or more on-premise data sources, more preparation might be required:

  • The simplest approach might be to consider allowlists and domain whitelisting to authorize access from Tableau Cloud to these data sources.

  • Alternatively, the use of Tableau Bridge provides a scalable and secure approach, but also requires a certain amount of planning, architecture, and maintenance.

The migration functionality provided by TabMove Lite is completely separate from these considerations for data source connectivity. The migration can be viewed as a “lift and shift” effort from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud, where the content will simply “pick up” on the available connectivity options on Tableau Cloud as it is being dropped there.

That being said, being aware of these requirements is primordial before considering Tableau Cloud and the migration, as these will have an impact on the to-be situation.

Tableau Bridge Set Up (if applicable)

If Tableau Bridge is to be used, it is recommended to already have everything in place to enable connectivity before starting the actual migration effort. Testing Tableau Bridge ahead of time is usually an effort that takes just a few days, and can prevent future headaches.

File-based data source restrictions

When connecting to file-based data sources (e.g. Excel, CSV, ...), some restrictions apply. Tableau Cloud can natively connect to file-based data sources on cloud-based file hosting services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, etc.

However, if you connect to files with Tableau, and these files are hosted elsewhere (specifically on a fileserver or network share on your company network), more restrictions apply. In fact, Tableau Bridge will be required to support connectivity to files hosted there.

For a full overview of Bridge’s supported connectors, see: https://help.tableau.com/current/online/en-us/to_sync_local_data.htm

Various

A few more important considerations are to be taken into account.

User Emails

On Tableau Cloud, usernames are effectively email addresses. This means that as we migrate to Tableau Cloud, TabMove will convert usernames that are not already email addresses where necessary. To be able to do so, TabMove relies on two possible sources to determine a user’s email address. Primarily, if a username is already an email address, TabMove will leverage that.

Alternatively, TabMove will use the email address attribute of users on Tableau Server. If users on Tableau Server are synced from Active Directory, it is very likely that this email attribute is already automatically populated. If it is not available, we should consider populating these for all users who should be migrated prior to migrating with TabMove. Users without email addresses will be dropped during the migration.

Row-level Security

The use of row-level security (RLS), if applicable, is likely to be impacted by the migration. The principal change that impacts RLS is the potential change from "generic" username to email address (see the section above).

Any use of the username to apply RLS (be it through joining security tables in the data, the use of the USERNAME() function, or other) should be reviewed. This could entail changes in the data, if security tables are in use. Alternatively, it could mean changes need to be applied in workbooks or data sources if the calculations enforcing RLS are impacted.

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TabMove is a product developed by Biztory.