As a server admin, do you have to broadcast notifications about server upgrade and other unexpected server events that would impact every server user?

It may not a big deal when you have only hundreds of server users. However it can become a big burden when your server has 20K, 100K or more users.  Even you have a good distribution list, overtime you are creating negative impressions to your user community since normally you only send negative news to them.

How to avoid broadcasting emails to large numbers of users while still communicate the message?

The answer is Tableau server portal customization with a banner like this one below:

Warning: It is not a supported solution and you are on your own risk.

• You can schedule the banner show up window.
• You can also control the type of banner (like Informational or Alert, etc).
• Users can click DISMISS button if they do not want to see the banner again (after clear the browser cache, the banner will still show up again during the window even DISMISS button clicked before).
• Users can {Click Here} to see more details as you do not want the banner to have more than one line
• You can design different color banner as well for different types of notification

How to use banner?

• We turn banner on a few days before  server upgrade to let  users know that they will access Disaster Recover instance
• Banner is also in during server upgrade to warn users that they are access Disaster Recover instance  that likely has different data than Production.

Re-cap: Tableau portal banner is a great way to communicate with users for server planned and unplanned event notifications. Pls vote https://community.tableau.com/ideas/3738