Are you a Tableau Admin? Do you want to define which Project/Workbook/Dashboard/DataStory users should initially see once they’re logged in?

Since many customers are used to have entry dashboards for most of their applications to show latest news, maintenance windows, updates and changes to their end users.  Many Tableau customers are using Tableau dashboards to do the exact same thing. Oftentimes they also guide users to internal wikis, enablement material and most popular vizzes (visualizations/dashboards). Yesterday I have talked to a large enterprise customer who wanted to define this entry page per site. Because every site has its own news, updates and most popular vizzes. Therefore I loved the requirement and I came up with the solution you can have a look at within bellow’s video.

You’ll see where Tableau Server stores custom Start Pages per user in its internal Postgres database (Repository). How to get access to it and how to modify the Start Page for a single user. If you want to adjust this for all users of a certain user group or site, you simply add this information to your SQL statement.

Last but not least I need to make sure to let you know, that every manual change to Tableau’s internal Postgres database is 100% NOT SUPPORTED!!! Tableau may change these internal database structures in future releases, which could affect changes like this! This advice is similar for every software vendor: It is not recommended to manually change application databases! So what should you do if you have a similar requirement?

1. Make a backup of your production environment!
2. Load this backup into a non-production environments!
3. Adjust the non-production repository as if you have seen it within the video and test it! (manually, Tabjolt, combination of both)
4. Afterwards you can decide how to deal with the value VS the additional effort it takes in order to automate and test this procedure for future releases.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts around it!