Migrating Multiple Sites

TabMove Lite supports migrating and merging up to three sites. If you select more than one site on the source Tableau Server environment, the following will happen: we are going to be “transforming” the source sites into top-level projects on Tableau Cloud. The following statement would be in line with this approach:

"We must preserve a specific hierarchy and differentiate between the content in the original sites. We want to continue emulating the functional aspects of sites."

Essentially, all the functional aspects pertaining to sites, would be transferred to exist/operate at a top-level project level:

  • Site Administrator users would become part of a group, that in turn is assigned Project Leader permissions.

  • All other site users would become part of a group that has read/view access to this new project.

  • That same all-site-users group would emulate/replace the previously site-wide All Users group on the source environment.

See the section on implications below for more details.

TabMove - Multi-Site and Merging.png
What two merged sites might look like.

Implications

Implications Related to Permissions

We need to account for how people’s roles are impacted by going from a site-based structure, to a project-based structure. The principal ramifications are the following:

  • The site gets “replaced” by a top-level project that intends to emulate the same structure and accesses as those that were present on the site.

  • Site Administrator users would become part of a group, that in turn is assigned Project Leader permissions to the new top-level project. This group is assigned, in fact, assigned project leader permissions to every project below this top-level project as well; this reflects the “unlimited” access Site Administrators would have had before. The name of this group is <Site Name> Administrators.

  • All other site users would become part of a group that has read/view access to this new top-level project. The same implication of trickle-down permissions does not apply, as all users may not have had access to all projects. The name of this group is <Site Name> Users.

  • That same site users group (<Site Name> Users) would emulate/replace the previously site-wide All Users group, though. This means that if the All Users group did have specific permissions on a certain project or asset, this new group will have the same permissions.

Implications Related to Site Roles

Aside from permissions, there are remaining implications related to users' site role. On Tableau Server, users may have different roles on different sites, e.g. administer one site as a Site Administrator Creator while just being a Viewer on another one. The following two rules are applied to determine someone’s new site role:

  • Site Administrators are demoted to the corresponding role without site-level privileges:

    • Site Administrator Creator Creator

    • Site Administrator Explorer Explorer (Can Publish)

  • Aside from that, users will retain this maximum role across sites. E.g. if someone is a Creator on one site, and a Viewer on 2 other sites, they will retain the role of Creator on the single destination site.

Note that the usual demotion from Server Administrator to Site Administrator Creator still applies, though this is unrelated to the fact that a migration might be multi-site or not.

Implications Related to Groups

All groups on a site will be prefixed with the site name. E.g. if there is a group Sales on the site Source Site A, it will become Source Site A | Sales. This is to prevent conflicts with identically named groups across sites, which would get mixed up with consequences to their permissions “spilling” across sites/projects.

TabMove is a product developed by Biztory.