Tableau Software is releasing an updated version of its namesake platform, bringing advanced mapping capabilities to the analytics solution.
“Big improvements include analytics, data prep, enterprise, and governance features,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau. “It’s a big release. It’s a good one.”
Tableau 10.2 will make complex geospatial analysis easier, simplify data prep with new ways to combine and clean data, and give enterprises more tools to deliver self-service analytics at scale, according to the company.
Building on Tableau's strong mapping capabilities, the new Spatial File Connector allows customers to leverage their spatial data directly in Tableau for easy geospatial analysis. Tableau now connects to ESRI Shapefiles, KML, GeoJSON and MapInfo file types.
Tableau 10.2 accelerates the data prep process, allowing people to union tables from a database. The update allows the platform to automatically recognize dates and make dates uniform with just one click.
Additionally, Tableau visualizations can now be made conformant to the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines drafted by the Web Accessibility Initiative, commonly referenced as WCAG 2.0 AA.
“Our dashboards and visualizations can be easily consumed by people with varying levels of abilities,” said Ajenstat.
Tableau 10.2 also improves the connectivity with SAP BW with Single Sign-on support. Tableau can now support the security rules defined in SAP BW and ensure that users can only see the data that they are authorized to see.
The enhancements bring 60 instant data connectors to the platform, including Apache Drill and Microsoft SharePoint lists.
Security is being improved to include single sign on support to help customers ensure that their most strategic data is secure and meeting the needs they have for their organization, Ajenstat said.
Analysts will benefit from the most advanced capabilities, such as visualizing spatial data, while data scientists will be able to build better models, according to Ajenstat.
“It’s a twofold benefit where you can take sophisticated skills and embed that for everybody else,” said Ajenstat. “The other big improvement is for the everyday user, the person who’s not an analyst, someone that is a regular business person who has questions of data.”
For more information about this update, visit www.tableau.com.