Tableau v2020.3 released a super useful  Tag ‘Stale Content’ feature.  There are two big use cases:  content archiving and stop extract refresh schedule for stale content.

How it works? How to automate the workflow?

• ‘Stale Content’ for server/site admins
• Tag ‘Stale Content’ 
• Automate archiving workflow
• Move or delete ‘Stale Content’
• Automate ‘Stale Content’ notification 

1. ‘Stale Content’ for server/site admins

‘Stale Content’ feature actually is available since v2020.2. However you can only tag the selected ‘Stale Content’ since v2020.3. The tag is the game changer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Tag ‘Stale Content’ 

Although you can tag ‘Stale Content’ since v2020.3 feature, the fact is that server does not do anything for the tagged content. Hmnn. What we can do about the tagged ‘Stale Content’?

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. How to use ‘Stale Content’ tag to automate your workflow?

After ‘Stale Content’ is tagged, a less known feature is that you can actually select all the content by the ‘Stale Content’ tag, then you can move all of them to an archiving project, later on  you can also delete them.  This is an easy archiving process.  Here is how to select all tagged content. 

 

 

 

 

4. How move or delete ‘Stale Content’?

See the flow below for the process. Recommend to lock the permission ‘Archiving’ project:

• After content is moved to ‘Archiving’ project, the owner remains the same so content owner can still access his/her workbook/datasource
• Content owner can even download the stale content after moved to ‘Archiving’ project
• Content owner can also re-publish the stale content to the original project if necessary – that is a good feature for a self-service platform
• End consumers will not have permission to access the content in  ‘Archiving’ project that should be fine as it has not been used for many days anyway.

5. How to notify ‘Stale Content’ owners?

When you tag/move/delete ‘Stale Content’, Tableau server will not send any notifications automatically. How to automate the notification process?

• Create VizAlert for moving to archiving project notification
• Use Webhooks API for deletion notification from archiving (‘WorkbookDeleted’ event and ‘DatasourceDeleted’ event)

Re-cap:  This blog actually provided an awesome and simple content archiving approaching by leveraging the new ‘Stale Content’ feature released since v2020.3.  This ‘Stale Content’ process is also the most effective approach to deal with server backgrounder delays – it can reduce about 40% backgrounder delays if this is the first time that you will stop extract jobs for stale content.