Deeper into the Tableau Repository Part 3: So many AD Groups

This is Part 3 of a series where we dig into the Tableau repository.

In my previous lives as a sysadmin I learned that there are very few things you actually have to do once. From that experience, I learned that I should script EVERYTHING!!! As our Tableau Server use grew people were confused why a user or group wasn't on the Tableau Server. I had to explain that users and groups have to be imported and import them. I took the next step of importing a group with all our employees. But what about groups?

On our dev server I wrote a script to find every group and import them. It worked fine except it took about 8 hours for the Tableau Server to sync them. Turns out in our organization we have about 30,000 users and 35,000 groups. Since that wouldn't work it was back to the drawing board. Since every group was out we needed to import groups people actually wanted without them bothering me.

I came up with a solution that used a Google Form. Users could enter the group name and minimum site role for that group. I used Pentaho to make a job that:

1. checks the Google Sheet with the results
2. checks the Tableau Repository for groups that are already imported
3. joins the two together and if any groups need to be imported import them with tabcmd
4. send the user who requested the group a confirmation email with the results
5. log the results to another tab in the Google Sheet. 

This job has been running 3 times a day for a couple years now and really cuts down on emails from the 300+ people who are publishing content. I found early on that users would sometimes include the @domain.com instead of just the group name so I ended up doing some error checking in the Google Form to check for an '@' character. Originally I allowed the requestor to choose the site role, but since all our employees got a 'Publisher' role when I altered it for the new roles 'Creator Publisher' is the only option.