Build Templates for Your Tableau Next Marketplace

Why Use Dashboard Templates?

To Establish Best Practices and Governance: Analysts can create and share "gold standard" templates for common analyses, for example, sales performance, marketing campaign effectiveness, customer churn. Establish consistency in reporting and adherence to organizational data governance standards.

Onboarding and Training: New data analysts can quickly get up to speed by using pre-built templates, understanding how established data models are used and how insights are visualized within the org. Using pre-built templates reduces ramp-up time significantly.

Accelerate Project Delivery: Instead of rebuilding similar dashboards for different departments or clients, analysts can leverage existing templates, customizing them as needed. Analysts can deliver analytical solutions faster and take on more projects.

Showcase Expertise and Build a Reputation: Talented analysts can gain visibility and recognition by creating and sharing highly effective and innovative templates that solve common business problems, which fosters a sense of community and internal thought leadership.

Facilitate Collaboration: Analysts often work across different business units. Shared templates can bridge knowledge gaps and enable more seamless data sharing and understanding between departments. For example, a finance analyst can use a sales team's template to understand revenue drivers from their perspective.

Streamline Ad Hoc Requests: When business users need quick insights, analysts can often fulfill these requests rapidly by adapting a relevant template rather than starting from scratch, increasing their efficiency and responsiveness.

Encourage Innovation through Iteration: When analysts share templates, others can build upon them, suggest improvements, or create variations, leading to a continuous cycle of innovation and refinement of analytical assets.

Why Use an App Template?

• Compatibility: Produce different flavors of an app based on the shape of the consumer org and its available data. You can specify a conditional rule to create an Einstein model only if the consumer org meets the minimum data requirements necessary for the model to function.
• Flexibility: Take customer input via the built-in installation wizard. Design wizard questions that prompt the user for values that configure data transformation formulas or that customize visualization parameters.
• Day 0 Guarantee: Make sure all components of the app work immediately upon successful installation, even if the app relies on asynchronous operations. Create data load and transformation orchestrations to provision data and metadata that’s not part of the template.
• Adaptive Longevity: Easy updates and reconfigurations after the initial installation. Data, orgs, and features change over time, and the app uses the template to reconfigure to adapt to these changes.

You can create and configure templates with ease using the Tableau Next template builder. Then, use Salesforce's developer tools to create advanced rules and settings, automate template development, and use your existing Salesforce DX flows, tools, and skills. Support for Metadata APIs, packaging, and scratch orgs is also provided.

The template platform ensures that installation succeeds with org readiness checks and automated prerequisites. You can customize app installation by creating a guided wizard to take user input.

What Is an App?

An app is a collection of Salesforce assets, and can be as simple as a single insight asset with a data source or as complex as a workspace with many insights, data sources, flows, and so on.

Creating an app in one org with one set of data works as a limited, one-time solution. But sharing that app and all of its specialized data processing and KPI knowledge with other organizations and customers is almost impossible without using templates and their powerful platform.

With the app template framework, after you create your source app, you can templatize it, add customizations and rules, and then package it to share in other orgs. Share this package on App Exchange for other Salesforce customers to use.

What Is an App Template

An app template is a collection of templatized Salesforce data and analytics resources that use a powerful rules engine and platform to create customized apps for each unique org. For Tableau Next, you create app templates from workspaces, which are containers of these resources.

App templates help you build highly flexible apps that can adapt to any org environment. They use platform features like automated setup and data processing engines to deploy apps with confidence.

You use your expertise and skills to build apps that analyze data, and templates allow you to share this with others. You empower others to apply the same expertise to their own data. You can turn your app, the one you developed, into a template. Then others can use the template to create an app that points to their data. The app you developed, and the template on which it’s based, determine the look and feel and functionality of the app. Users of your template build apps that deliver the same user experience but use their own data. You can also build flexibility into the template so that it’s customized to how each org stores and views data.