At my place, somebody a while back drank the Tableau koolaid and quickly designed some nice looking graphs and sold the commercial team on its value, and the president signed a check for a license.

The software team was then tasked with putting the fancy graphs that guy did into our web application with the following constraints:

- the Tableau server can't be exposed on the public internet

- our UI can't indicate that it's using Tableau anywhere (i.e., use an iframe or something)

This turns out to be tricky. Tableau doesn't really like to be embedded in 3rd party applications, it leaks information about itself in a number of places. It requires that every person looking at the graph be a user according to Tableau's definition of user. Synchronizing authentication to Tableau server and workbook authorization gets tricky.

The next task coming up is that they want users to be able to ad-hoc schedule an email to themselves with the fancy graphs attached as a pdf, so we've got that to look forward to.