Please note that Portals for Tableau are now officially known as Curator by InterWorks. You can learn more at the official Curator website.
If you’re connecting Tableau Cloud to Curator with Curator Users authentication and want users to only receive Curator’s onboarding email (and not Tableau’s!), this step-by-step guide will walk you through the full setup. The goal is to send only one onboarding email to your users and avoid confusion about where to go next.
1. Add the Tableau Connection
Go to Settings > Connections > Tableau, add your connection using the Personal Access Token (PAT) credentials, and save.
2. Set Authentication to Curator Users
Go to Settings > Portal > Authentication, select Curator Users and save.
Note: Tableau Cloud requires usernames to be email addresses.
3. Configure Curator Email
We have a complete guide to connect up your Curator instance with an email server here.
Note: If your email connection is properly setup, related email toggles will become available automatically. If those toggles are still disabled, it indicates that your email setup is not yet complete. Maybe you forgot to change the sender email address to a valid address from your domain?To allow new users to set their own password, enable the Reset Password security feature in Settings > Portal Settings. More details here.
You probably had the basics in place. If you didn’t, you do now; so let’s now jump into juicy bits and pieces:
4. Supressing Tableau’s Welcome Email
Leave the Curator space and open Tableau Cloud: Tableau Cloud doesn’t let you disable its invite emails if you are using local Tableau with MFA authentication only, which is the standard setup on Tableau Cloud. However, if you have SAML configured, you’ll get the option to suppress those emails. Think of it as Tableau just making sure users get a warm welcome. In our case, we’ll take over that duty in Curator!
a) Set up SAML on your Tableau Cloud site
You need to configure SAML on your Tableau Cloud site to unlock the setting. If you don’t have a SAML IdP, don’t worry because this can be a dummy SAML schema that the InterWorks team can help you with.
Alternatively, you can use Curator as your IdP and generate the SAML metadata following this guide.
b) Disable site invite emails
Once SAML is active, go to Settings > General in Tableau Cloud and uncheck Enable site invite emails. With SAML configured, you’ll now be able to disable that options and that is exactly what we want!
5. Add Tableau Cloud Users
Now that your second authentication method is set up, you can add users to Tableau Cloud as usual.
- Make sure you choose the SAML authentication option from step 4.a) in the dropdown.
- Assign the appropriate Site Role.
- And add your users.
6. Add the Same Frontend Users in Curator
Almost done! The final step is to add your frontend users in Curator. Follow this guide.Here you can decide whether to send the signup email right away or later:
- To send it immediately, keep the Send Curator Signup Email toggle enabled.
- To manually send it later, disable the toggle for now. After the user is created, a Send registration email button will appear in the top right corner. Ready when your are!
Final Recommendations
Before finishing up, make sure your users sync with Tableau Cloud. Go to Platform Users on your Frontend user and hit the Sync From Tableau button if it’s not found a match yet.
If you want users to be able to log directly into Tableau Cloud too, you can change their authentication method back to Tableau with MFA in Tableau Cloud. Just note that they’ll need to reset passwords and MFA on Tableau Cloud to eventually being able to log in there.
If you chose for Curator as your SAML IdP, you’re all set.
Give it a try and create your first test user. Confirm they only receive the Curator email and not Tableau’s. If anything doesn’t go as expected, reach out to your friendly Curator folks.
