Local deployments require the use of the Dashboard Viewer desktop application (available on Windows platforms only). End users open locally-deployed dashboards in the Dashboard Viewer, which must be pre-installed locally or on a shared file system. See Building and Using Dashboards for information about using the Dashboard Viewer.

With web-based deployment, the Dashboard Viewer does not need to be installed locally. Dashboards are invoked through a web browser, and are installed on demand, as web pages or Web Start applications, so they can easily be deployed across a wide area network, including the internet.

For Web Start deployments, the local web browser must have the Java plug-in. For simple web page deployments, no Java plug-in is required. See Data server and display server.