Changes to asset Admin permissions and new Plan Asset Admin role, now generally available!

Lekshmi Unnithan
Lekshmi Unnithan Employee
edited 06/17/24 in Product Announcements

Update on 03/25/2024: Phase 1 of the asset ownership changes is now available for all customers.


Hi Community, 

Currently, core Smartsheet assets (such as sheets, reports, forms, and dashboards) are owned by individuals in a plan. However, the current ownership model can create friction when key stakeholders or asset owners leave the plan or organization. In order to combat this, we are making some changes to improve the experience of SysAdmins and end users by moving the ownership of assets from the individual to the plan level.

We will be launching these changes in multiple phases. In the first phase, we will upgrade the permissions of Admins on a core Smartsheet asset to that of an Owner and introduce a new Plan Asset Admin role.

The release will contain the changes we originally listed:

  • Introduction of the new Plan Asset Admin role
  • Enabling Admins on an asset to have the same permissions as Owner (rename/delete)
  • Updating the Access Request notification flow to
  • Send access request to owner and admin(s)
  • If owner is deactivated and no admins exist, send to Plan Asset Admin
  • If no Plan Asset Admin is assigned, send to SysAdmin

If you have admins in a workspace or on an asset, they will get the access requests notification. This is to ensure the requests are going to people who are managing the asset and the requests aren’t bottlenecked on an individual person. It helps solve the issue when the owner is no longer at the company or on vacation and the access requests are not fulfilled.

If you have current Admins who should not be approving access, we recommend lowering their access level to be Editors. We are also looking at introducing a new permission on assets between Editor and Admin that may help in the future. This was hinted at in the following blog that also talks about some of the new features that are also coming.

Future phases will involve the deprecation of the “Owner” permission on core Smartsheet assets, sometime in 2024. More details will be provided in the coming months.

These changes will impact all users in all plan types in the Commercial US and EU instances of Smartsheet.

Learn more about these changes.

You can also stay informed by subscribing to receive product release updates for curated news of recently released product capabilities and enhancements for the platform of your choosing, delivered to your inbox. As new releases occur, you will receive a weekly email with news of what's released every Tuesday. 

Cheers,

Lekshmi Unnithan

The Smartsheet Product Team

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Answers

  • rosegarretson
    rosegarretson ✭✭✭✭

    This seems very logical - I know in the past we have run across some hurdles when a team member leaves. Thanks for the info.

  • Matt Rasmussen
    Matt Rasmussen ✭✭✭✭

    Great feature. People leave and the Smartsheet asset is in limbo until an admin assigns a new owner and resets the sharing permissions.

  • Darla Brown
    Darla Brown Overachievers

    Looking forward to learning all about this. Love the idea and second what @darkmatter said. We definitely need it for WorkApp!!

    Darla Brown

    What you meditate on, you empower!

    Overachiever - Core Product Certified - Mobilizer - EAP

  • Samuel Mueller
    Samuel Mueller Overachievers

    Very exciting, thank you for the update.

  • I look forward to this. Our current issue is there is no way to copy or reassign integration workflows. Hopefully this will resolve that issue.

  • QuanT
    QuanT Employee

    @Patrick I H The initial launch doesn't solve for workflow reassignment but we are working closely with the workflows team on ownership changes. We plan on launching more changes around ownership throughout the year

  • Will the update allow for Plan Backups so we do not have to rely on the "creator" of the sheet to do this? There have been several incidents where the creator never set up backups for their items and had to learn the hard way. They needed the backup, but it was never set up and countless hours were sent to recreate information.

  • Kayla
    Kayla ✭✭✭✭✭

    Will notifications that previously came from the 'Sheet Owner' now come from the 'Sheet Creator' --- or will that also be changed so we can pick who the notification comes from?

    For example, we have our compliance items come from the compliance director (someone they recognize the name) so when the Smartsheet Automation comes through, it also includes her name so people open it and review it -- know it's important. We would absolutely want to maintain that.

  • Don Young
    Don Young ✭✭✭✭

    I agree with @Julie Becker - making a change such that folks will be required to spend more money & create/manage a separate account in order to isolate private files seems like a potentially unnecessary backward step. Hopefully you are able to find a way to avoid removal of this existing capability before broadly rolling out.

  • DanMorales
    DanMorales ✭✭✭

    Will there be changes to the API that will be deployed with this release? If so, could you please share the documented changes?

    Dan Morales | Product Manager @ SoftwareX - Smartsheet Aligned Platinum Partner

  • Gabriel Barrera
    Gabriel Barrera ✭✭✭✭

    This is a step in the right direction!

    We've recently had to go through the process of managing/transferring assets from one user to another - and it wasn't the most intuitive system. I think this is a great change.

    We would love to see ability to query a user's associated automations as well. Or an option to transfer automations to another if the user being removed is the recipient.

  • Chris Schuh
    Chris Schuh ✭✭
    edited 01/08/24

    I noticed in the email communication about the change that there might be a change to the SAML single sign-on connection. We have already set up SAML for our organization, will we need to update the settings when these changes go into effect? If so, when should we make these changes to ensure no disruptions to our end users?