Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. It offers more than 70 undergraduate majors and a full range of graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges. Routinely recognized as one of the leading academic institutions in the US, Vanderbilt’s mission is to “bring out the best humanity – pushing new ideas into the frontiers of discovery, challenging the limits of what’s possible and working diligently in the service of others.”
Technologies Used
- Tableau Desktop
- Tableau Cloud
Services Used
The Decision to Migrate to Tableau Cloud
Like many organizations across the world, Vanderbilt University relied on Tableau Server to meet their wide-ranging data analysis needs. With improved convenience and enhanced functionality arising in Tableau Cloud, they decided it was time to migrate from their existing Tableau Server instance.
Vanderbilt University started with a single 8-core license and had server upgrades once a year. The migration in 2024 was slated to go from 2023.1 Server to 2024.3 Cloud, serving 100 Creators, about 300 explorers and about 400 Viewers across all faculty and staff.
They outlined a number of challenges they expected transitioning to Cloud, from big things like communicating to their hundreds of users of upcoming changes to little things like changing from a URL to a URI.
Even with the challenges inherent in a migration, they still saw the benefits of Tableau Cloud, like embedding Tableau Pulse into a dashboard, improved Tableau Mobile experience and better Admin Insights into data. To help ensure their migration went smoothly, they reached out to InterWorks for a helping hand.
Working with InterWorks
When InterWorks was brought on, we got down into the weeds to handle the little details and the big move. Solutions Architect Sarah Dorfman took the lead to provide migration tools with developer-level expertise to ensure the migration went smoothly. There were weekly check-in meetings to make sure that InterWorks and Vanderbilt were aligned every step of the way while the InterWorks experts handled the technical parts of the migration itself.
“They handled the migration of everything.”
— Evan Alini, Tableau Manager, DSA, Vanderbilt University
Additionally, Vanderbilt’s own project manager helped tremendously by ensuring that the right IT personnel from Vanderbilt’s side were at every appropriate meeting, helping streamline the process.
Between Vanderbilt’s extensive pre-work on the migration and their commitment to doing anything they could to have their proverbial ducks in a row, the partnership between InterWorks and Vanderbilt was smooth sailing for all involved.
Improvements During and After Migration
During the downtime of the migration, Vanderbilt trained and upskilled their users to ensure they were ready to hit the ground running once everything was switched over to Cloud. Once they had the new Cloud in their hands, Vanderbilt’s data connections increased by a factor of 10, going from about 130 to about 1,460, showing just how much use they were getting out of the new setup.
“So, our top three departments for Vanderbilt of dashboard activity is DAR (Development and Alumni Relations), Career Center and our HR is starting to come up from the bottom. They weren’t [heavy users] before the migration, but they have become high adopters of Tableau Pulse, for sure.”
— Evan Alini, Tableau Manager, DSA, Vanderbilt University
As far as migrations go, Vanderbilt’s was a rousing success, smoothly rolling out a newly upgraded and more capable Tableau Cloud to their end users, enabling them to achieve greater insights and better data for years to come.
