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As the world’s leading analytics platform, Tableau is a big player in the problem-solving industry. Providing key insights through their visual analytics platform, they can empower you and your business to make critical changes and use your data intelligently.

With such a detailed and easy-to-use dashboard to help you see and analyze your data, it only makes sense to play to Tableau’s strengths and present the insights it gives you on the big screen, in front of the key players that can make decisions based on those insights.

This is where your digital signage comes into play, allowing you to set up screens in front of the teams that need to make use of the data, rescuing it from behind pesky logins and creating a more collaborative and effective environment for your business.

Fugo’s new TV Dashboards feature allows for smart, easy, and - most importantly - secure integration with your Tableau dashboards. It allows for you to make full use of your Tableau dashboards and display them on workplace screens without having to risk your privacy by creating a publicly accessible URL, or by storing your login credentials on an insecure player that can be taken out of the office or remotely accessed, revealing your details.

Fugo handles all of your encryption and access on a private and secure Cloud server, which means you can rest easy in the knowledge that your data is safe and sound, and won’t be intercepted by people sniffing around your network. This makes Fugo one of the most secure digital signage platforms available for integration with third-party dashboards.

Let's dive in!

Before we start the walkthrough for connecting your Tableau account and displaying your dashboards on your digital signage screens, let’s go over a few best practices for connecting a third-party service with Fugo CMS:

1. Create a service account:

We've worked hard to develop the TV dashboards feature so that your sensitive data is completely secure. But as an extra precaution, we highly recommend using a 'least privileged' service account when setting up your dashboards - this is usually an account that has read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display on your screen(s.) You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.

2. Start with your dashboard URL

It's often the case that you can navigate directly to your target dashboard's URL when creating a new dashboard in Fugo. This will require you to log in, and then you’ll be redirected back to your destination. This is the quickest and most reliable journey you can make in Fugo Dashboards as it cuts out unnecessary steps in your journey.

2.1 Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

2.2 Make sure your screen(s) are connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for that here.

2.3 Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.

2.4 Click Create Dashboard to get started. This will take you to the New Dashboard recorder page where you will follow the instructions to capture and preview your dashboard before publishing it to screen.

2.5 Enter the URL of the Tableau dashboard you want to display and click Go.

2.6 If this is your first time creating a TV dashboard, a popup guiding you on how to configure your Chrome browser to allow the Fugo recorder to run in incognito mode will appear. You can find our instructions for allowing incognito mode here. If this is not your first time, you can skip this step.

2.7 The Fugo recorder will open a new incognito window using the URL you entered earlier. This window will contain the Tableau login screen. enter your Tableau username and password to sign in as normal.

2.8 Now that you're viewing the dashboard that you want to display (you will have navigated directly to it by using the direct URL for your dashboard in step 2.5, you have a few options:

a. If you're happy with everything in the viewport being displayed on your screen, you can click Capture Dashboard in the recording pane at the bottom of your window. This will capture the whole screen, and prepare it for display on your digital signage.

b. If you want to remove a few of the UI elements (such as the navigation bar or tool bar) from the screenshot, you can use the Eraser button to delete those elements from the screenshot, then make sure to click Finish Erasing when you're done.

c. If you want to capture certain elements of your dashboard (such as one particular graph or piece of data ) you can use the Element Screenshot option to capture only that element in your screenshot.

2.9 The recorder will now close. At this stage, you will see a “loading” area in Fugo CMS — this may be present for several seconds to a few minutes while the Fugo recorder securely sends the instructions from the right-hand pane to the secure Cloud server, and fetches the first screenshot for display. Once it appears, ensure that it looks the way you’d expect.

❗ If you find that the Recorder can’t log in, ensure that your email and password are correct. If you can see on the Recorder that your password is being entered into the email field, select the pencil icon next to the “enter password” step, and then select the cog icon. Delete everything in the field that appears, other than “#password”.

❗ Tableau displays popup notifications when you log in. Because you’re going through incognito mode, it doesn’t remember that you’ve chosen to hide these popups, and the recorder can sometimes have trouble dealing with these. If you’re finding that the recorder is getting trapped by the popups, please click the pencil icon next to the “click x” step, then select the cog icon. Delete everything in this field, and enter “.walkme-action-close”.

2.10 From here, you can either click the Publish button to get your dashboard displaying on your existing screens, channels or in your existing playlists immediately, or select Save to allow you to come back and publish it later.

If you've followed all the steps to capture your dashboard, but the preview is still coming up blank, it's possible that there is a parameter of your dashboard URL preventing Fugo from capturing a screenshot of your dashboard.

Often times, this may be attributed to the parameter ?:embed=yes which can be added to a dashboard URL to remove portions of the Tableau UI (such as the navigation bar or tool bar) from appearing and to isolate only the data visuals in the viewport.

If it's the case that your dashboard is failing because of this embed text in your URL, you may encounter this error in Fugo CMS:

☝️ Note: this error may also appear if your dashboard is behind a firewall that Fugo can't access.

To troubleshoot this, we recommend starting fresh with a New Dashboard in Fugo, then pasting the dashboard URL into the URL field with the ?:embed=yes text omitted from the URL.

It’s all very well and good to log in to Tableau and view your dashboards on your laptop or computer screen, but there are a few extra things to bear in mind when you’re displaying a dashboard on a TV or another screen for a group of people.

The people viewing and using this data will usually be sat much further away and probably won’t have direct control over what they’re looking at, which means you’ll have to make some changes to help them make the best of what they’re seeing.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your Tableau dashboards displaying on your digital signage:

Here’s a handy guide from the experts at Tableau on delivering insights with their platform.

If you’re having trouble connecting your Tableau dashboards to Fugo, or if you have any feedback on the Dashboards feature, please drop our support team a line at support@fugo.ai or use this link to book a live support call with our Dashboards team to walk you through your TV Dashboards setup.