3 settings to suppress unwelcoming email invites in Tableau Cloud

If you are embedding Tableau Cloud content to your product, sending the default Tableau email invites to newly onboarded users is rather unwelcoming!

But you can easily get rid of them with just 3 settings!

Before we dive into how easy you can do it, we’ll be setting up a dummy SSO authentication method. You should have at least one Site Admin user that isn’t using that dummy SSO Auth setting, otherwise you may lock yourself out of the site!

Setting #1: Enable an additonal SSO method

Do this, even if you have no intent to use them — e.g. due to using JWT/Connected Apps for sso AuthN instead)

Go to Settings → Authentication → Tick “Enable an additional authentication method” → Pick any of the available options, e.g. “SAML”

Don’t bother configuring it, unless SAML is your actual SSO method.

Setting #2: Disable “Site Invite Notifications”

Go to Settings → General → Untick “Enable site invite emails”

Setting #3: Onboard new users with SSO authentication

Just set the auth method for your new users to match what’ve chosen in Setting #1 above (e.g. “saml”).

If you do happen to use SAML for Embedded content SSO, great, this is an actual step would have to configure to get your solution up and running anyway.

If not, then probably you plan to use Connected Apps/JWT for SSO instead. In this case, this setting is just a dummy config step to suppress sending those unwelcoming email invites.

a) For Manual user provisioning:

Go to Users → Add Users → Choose “SAML”

b) For programmatic onboarding of users with the Rest API:

Make sure to include the auth method in the payload of the the “Add Site User” post request as in the screenshot below:

That’s it. The newly onboarded users won’t be receiving email invites anymore.

Do you think there’s gotta be an easier and more native way? If so, please vote for Tableau to implement this as a native feature here in the Ideas Forum.