How to Make Phone Calls from Tableau via Cisco Jabber

Belinda needs to call business partners in foreign countries regularly. She has a dashboard showing various deadlines that she has to monitor. If a deadline is overdue, she may need to talk to the partner in question. She has already integrated email in the dashboard via URL action. She came to me because she wanted to initiate phone calls right from the Tableau dashboard. BTW, the calls have to be made through Cisco Jabber, a network based phone software.

After a number of tests, I found a working solution for her. Here it is. We use Mac. For Windows users, you may find hints here.

1. Set the preferences in Jabber to make it the default. Otherwise, Mac will open FaceTime to call.

2. Create a URL action in Tableau. Make sure you have a phone number column in the data set. The numbers start with 9011 instead of +. Insert the column in the URL action settings. Note that the URL syntax is like 

• Tel:9011<Country Code><Phone Number>

Voila. 

Feel free to leave comments or contact me at twitter@aleksoft.