Hi Tableaufans,
Integrating Tableau into Salesforce is more important to customers than ever before! Since Salesforce announced Tableau’s acquisition in 2019 the platform of Salesforce and Tableau are getting closer and closer together. Even prior to the acquisition announcement customers have been integrating Tableau into Salesforce! In order to have a smooth user experience you don’t want users to login twice! That’s why single sign-on is crucial for administrators setting up the environment for internal users as well as external customers! Yes, you’ve been reading it correctly, you can also integrate Tableau into Salesforce in order to monetize data you’ve got in your corporate data lakes! With Tableau in your infrastructure you also don’t necessarily need to move all of your data into Salesforce!

For example having an SAP HANA on premise environment, together with Snowflake in the cloud as well as some flat files which you want to monetize as Visualizations via Salesforce is absolutely possible and something the market already started doing.

As this use case might sound way beyond what you’re trying to do in step 1 let me underline that embedding Tableau into Salesforce internally is even more common. Use cases for it are limitless. Your users might benefit from seeing:

• dashboards within the context of single accounts in order to see the life time spent of a customer
• predicted next best actions
• products which the customer might need based on buying patterns of others
• the history of decreasing support tickets over time
• deals which you might want to bundle
• customers which you should focus on next
• the success of marketing initiatives
• marketing initiatives which you should promote
• triggering actions outside of Tableau/Salesforce directly from within a dashboard
  (placing an order, buying/selling stocks, open up a ticket, calling a REST endpoint, etc…)

Tableau internally embeds Tableau Dashboards into different contexts of Salesforce for all kinds of different roles (Sales, Marketing, Support, HR, …) ever since. From a technology perspective it is way easier than ever! When you’re using the same SAML provider for Salesforce and Tableau, you’re basically ready to go. You might want to check out the Tableau Viz Lightning Web Component for Salesforce which allows you to embed (integrate) Tableau visualizations right into Salesforce pages without the need to write HTML or JavaScript:

Independent from HOW you’re embedding Tableau into Salesforce you probably want to have Single Sign-On enabled as described above. A great colleague of mine – Alex Eskinasy – recently wrote a blog post about how to achieve this with Tableau Online + Salesforce. This includes a detailed step-by-step video which you can find here:

How to configure Tableau Online SAML SSO with Salesforce Identity (and some key gotchas)