Tableau Desktop vs Tableau Server

Question

I am using a trail version of tableau on my system. I have built dashboards from excel and published the workbook to tableau server. My company is ready to pay for any licensing costs. But in the coming future I have to migrate all my excel data sources to a MYSQL DB.

Our ultimate goal is to build a data warehouse, create visualization in Tableau and publish the content to end users.

The end users can only view and filter the tableau dashboards. Additionally I am even planning to use SQL Server to import and update the data warehouse on quarterly basis.

I think having Tableau Desktop on my workstation is all I need to publish dashboards for end users. Additionally, I think that if the end users simply have Tableau Reader then that is all they require to view the dashboard
Am I correct?

Answer 1

Yes you can start with Tableau Desktop. It is a very powerful tool in itself and can be purchased at the price lower than that of Tableau Server.

Desktop gives you both the option to create and publish your dashboards. These dashboards might get connected to flat files as data source or even a database or datawarehouse. Both works equally.
You can even schedule subscriptions where registered users will receive eMail with the snapshot of the data in the dashboard at the time specified by the developer.

As such, there are no downsides of using Tableau Desktop over Tableau Server. There are a few functionalities that are only enabled in Tableau Server but absence of them won't cause any hinderance to your services.

On the other hand, if your organisation deals in B2B models, Tableau server gives you enough Security and better collaboration features. It has good visualisations on mobile devices.