FAQ

For all your questions, asked frequently.

Which assets does TabMove (Lite) migrate?

TabMove has been developed to cover a wide range of content and metadata. This is a non-exhaustive list of “stuff” or assets that TabMove can migrate automatically:

  • Projects

  • Workbooks

  • Data Sources

  • Flows

  • Users

  • Groups & memberships

  • All permissions and ownership for projects and content

  • Schedules and Tasks:

    • Extract Refreshes

    • Subscriptions

  • Custom Views

  • Data-Driven Alerts

  • Favorites

  • Collections

  • Personal Spaces

The following information is supported by TabMove when delivered as a service, but not by TabMove Lite.

Which assets does TabMove (Lite) not migrate?

There are a number of assets that TabMove does not migrate.

  • Metrics: because these are rarely used widely in an organization.

  • Comments: because of their point-in-time nature.

  • Virtual Connections: because of their dependency on the Advanced Management add-on.

  • Revision history: because the overhead is disproportionate to the benefit.

  • Thumbnails (in exceptional cases): these get recreated upon the next extract refresh or publication of a workbook.

  • Connection Credentials (see: What happens to connection credentials?)

For any further questions as to whether a specific item or property on Tableau can be migrated, feel free to reach out to tabmove@biztory.com.

Which versions of Tableau Server are supported?

See:

Does TabMove (Lite) support Tableau Bridge?

Short answer: yes. For more details, see:

Site Invite Emails and Disabling Them

Tableau Cloud automatically sends out email invites to users that are created. This is necessary when opting to use Tableau Cloud’s built-in authentication (as opposed to single sign-on (SSO)). It is a step designed to first notify them about their access to the site, and then allow them to create their Tableau Cloud password.

However, when using SSO, it might not be desirable to keep these emails enabled. These can be disabled if the following two conditions are met:

  • SSO is effectively configured on Tableau Cloud.

  • The setting for email invites has been disabled on the General site settings tab of Tableau Cloud, under "Site Invite Notification".

Even when not using SSO, you might not want to send Site Invite Emails to your users right away (e.g. you are testing the migration for the first time). Regardless of the final setup you will use (potentially requiring Site Invite Emails to effectively be sent), you can apply the two settings above (SSO enabled + invites disabled) to ensure emails are not sent.

Do make sure that you also select the adequate SSO method in the TabMove Configuration stage when wanting to avoid Site Invite Emails, even if you do not intend to use SSO in the future:

 

CleanShot 2024-08-21 at 10.34.09-20240821-083418.png
TabMove Configuration screen section where authentication can be configured.

 

What happens to connection credentials?

For self-explanatory security reasons, the credentials for workbooks' and data sources' connections can not be read from Tableau Server and automatically migrated by TabMove Lite. Hence, one of the first actions to be taken consists of reapplying these connection credentials on Tableau Cloud to ensure live connections functions, and extracts can be refreshed.

While this may sound daunting, this is actually a simple process, which is explained in this video: Updating Connection Credentials on Tableau Cloud.

Troubleshooting

Not all files are downloaded during the Download phase

Long story short: if there is a load balancer or reverse proxy between Tableau Server and TabMove, and the load balancer got up on the wrong side of the bed… it can prevent you from downloading some of those assets.

More specifically, there are situations where Tableau Server needs some time to prepare your download. E.g., it is in fact fetching the twb for the workbook, as well as the extract(s) that go(es) with it, and putting this al back into a twbx archive. Which takes time.

And if that time that it takes is longer than a certain load balancer’s timeout, the load balancer is going to tell TabMove something along the lines of: 504 Gateway Timeout. A “nice” way of saying: I lost my patience waiting for the application (Tableau) to provide the file for download; move on.

If a workbook or data source contains a very large extract, consider disabling the extract before migration the asset. Alternatively, review the load balancer’s timeout with the IT/network/infrastructure team and consider increasing it.

OAuth connection credentials not working (Google Drive, Sheets, BigQuery, Snowflake, …)

Updating connection credentials is trivial for most connection types (see: What happens to connection credentials?). For connections using OAuth specifically, we have seen cases where reapplying credentials needs to be done twice instead of once, due to how Tableau stores these.

The first time after applying credentials, the following error message may be shown when opening a workbook (with live connection) or refreshing an extract:

Tableau needs an unexpired OAuth refresh token to connect to the data. Authorize refresh tokens or ask the datasource owner for help. Google Drive has rejected this request because of insufficient permissions.

This can be addressed by completely removing the credentials before adding them again. That is:

  • Editing the connection, and removing the credentials.

  • Removing the credentials from the owner’s account settings.

  • Adding the credentials to the applicable connections again, through the Edit Connection dialog.

TabMove is a product developed by Biztory.