PAUSED - Changes to Sheet Access and Published Items reports in Admin Center

Lekshmi Unnithan

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 4, 2023:

Previously, we communicated that we will be making changes to the Sheet Access and Published Items reports in the Smartsheet Admin center on December 5, 2023 (see post below). However, due to several requests from customers, we have made the decision to delay these changes until further notice. There will be no changes made to these reports tomorrow, and if we do decide to make these changes again, another advanced notice period will be offered. If you’re having trouble with the current version of these reports, please submit a Support ticket and we can look at options to best support your needs.

ORIGINAL POST ON OCTOBER 31, 2023:

Hi Community, 

We wanted to share some details on upcoming changes we will be making to the Sheet Access and Published Items reports in the Smartsheet Admin Center.

Today, these reports can be time-consuming to generate and contain thousands of rows, making them difficult to consume.

To improve the experience and enable additional automation we will be: 

1. Removing asset and workspace names from the Sheet Access & Published Items reports and making this information retrievable through the new resource API URL and resource ID fields, so your admins can automate the retrieval of the desired information. 
2. Removing the owner field from both reports and making this information retrievable through the new permissions set name column in the Sheet Access report, which will list each user or group and their shared permission.

These changes will go into effect on December 5, 2023.

With this change, admins may need to create scripts to consume the data within these reports – and sample Ruby scripts will be provided as a reference. SysAdmins without the required expertise or access to programming tools are advised to work with their IT teams to create the necessary scripts to parse the report data.

Please note that you will still be able to view the shared to email addresses in the new Sheet Access report as well as the publishing user email addresses in the new Published Items report without any custom scripting.

For more information, please refer to this help article. If you have any further questions or feedback, please fill out this form and a member of the Smartsheet team will get back to you.

You can also stay informed by subscribing to receive product release updates.

Best regards,

The Smartsheet Product Team

Lekshmi Unnithan

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 4, 2023:

Previously, we communicated that we will be making changes to the Sheet Access and Published Items reports in the Smartsheet Admin center on December 5, 2023 (see post below). However, due to several requests from customers, we have made the decision to delay these changes until further notice. There will be no changes made to these reports tomorrow, and if we do decide to make these changes again, another advanced notice period will be offered. If you’re having trouble with the current version of these reports, please submit a Support ticket and we can look at options to best support your needs.

Scott Peters

@Lekshmi Unnithan - Would it be possible to for you to post examples of what the revised reports will look like? For example, will the columns now be blank or removed all together? Will any other columns be renamed or change position? We will need to update data shuttle jobs and test this well in advance so our current automations do not break.

Sarah Keortge

Yes, please provide examples so that your customers can begin planning for this change. This is critical data and for many organizations it takes time to get IT resources lined up for supporting something like this. A month is short notice.

MCorbin

+1 for samples... That will allow us to get our processes changed and tested before the rollout.

Lekshmi Unnithan

@Scott Peters - Please take a look at the help article linked in the Community post above for more details. It lists all the columns in the new reports and shows sample screenshots of what the new reports look like (after the csv is generated and imported into Smartsheet). cc: @Sarah Keortge and @MCorbin.

MCorbin

Thanks @Lekshmi Unnithan - but it still would be helpful to get a sample report so that we can start working on updating our automations

Lekshmi Unnithan

Hi @MCorbin - I've included two sample reports for the new sheet access and published items reports.

Updated Sheet Access Report.xlsx

Updated Published Items Report.xlsx

MCorbin

@Lekshmi Unnithan - YOU ARE THE BEST!!!!! 🙌

MCorbin

@Lekshmi Unnithan - are these reports going to come as XLSX files or CSV?

In the sample files, the Resource ID and Subject ID got compressed. I know it's not real data, but I want to make sure it's not going to be an ongoing issue when we get the live files.

Lekshmi Unnithan

@MCorbin - These reports will come as CSV files. I am unable to upload the sample reports on Smartsheet Community as CSV formats, so I've uploaded them as XLSX formats instead. Resource ID and Subject ID will not get compressed in the original CSV file downloads.

MCorbin

@Lekshmi Unnithan - Good news - thanks! :-)

Scott Peters

@Lekshmi Unnithan - Thank you for this. In our organization we will still need both reports with asset names and workspace paths Dec 5 forward, but for now we have to build them ourselves. In order to test this we (each customer) will need to create our own version of the new report to test with, where we calculate the API string, then test the Ruby script to retrieve the asset names and paths, copy that into an excel file, and then test the Data Shuttle uploads with these new columns

Can you help us understand the full syntax of each API URL? How do we gather that from Smartsheet using the current reports, or calculate them in Excel? Assuming Asset ID is in column A, then I imagine it would be something like:

=HYPERLINK("https://api.smartsheet.com/notsurewhatgoeshere/"&A2)

cc @Sarah Keortge and @MCorbin

Lekshmi Unnithan

Hello @Scott Peters.

Thank you for reaching out for clarification on the syntax for constructing the API URLs and testing them prior to the update of the Sheet Access and Published Items reports. Let’s break down the steps you can take to prepare for this change:

API URL Syntax:

The format for the Resource API URLs you'll use after the changes go live will be as follows:

• For a sheet: https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/sheets/{{Resource ID}}
• For a report:https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/reports/{{Resource ID}}
• For a dashboard:https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/dashboards/{{Resource ID}}

The syntax for the Subject API URLs will be: https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/users/{{Subject ID}} or https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/groups/{{Subject ID}} based on if the Subject Type is "user" or "group".

Locating Resource IDs:

To find the {{Resource ID}} for sheets, reports, or dashboards before the Sheet Access report is updated, you can navigate within Smartsheet to the specific asset, select File > Properties, and locate the asset ID listed there.

User IDs :

As for User IDs, these are not readily displayed in the Smartsheet UI since email addresses serve as the primary identifier. To obtain User IDs, you will need to utilize the Get User API. Here’s a quick guide on how you might retrieve User IDs:

1. Make an API call to the Users endpoint: https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/users
2. Parse the response to extract User IDs associated with each user’s email address.

For more information, please review the Smartsheet Developer Portal.

MCorbin

Thank you @Lekshmi Unnithan - you just saved me a lot of time looking things up :-)

Lekshmi Unnithan

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 4, 2023:

Previously, we communicated that we will be making changes to the Sheet Access and Published Items reports in the Smartsheet Admin center on December 5, 2023 (see post below). However, due to several requests from customers, we have made the decision to delay these changes until further notice. There will be no changes made to these reports tomorrow, and if we do decide to make these changes again, another advanced notice period will be offered. If you’re having trouble with the current version of these reports, please submit a Support ticket and we can look at options to best support your needs.

ker9

It would be nice if we could connect to the sheet access report through Alteryx rather than downloading or API.