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

QuanT

Thanks everyone for your feedback! Trying to respond to the last few messages here:

@LyndaVance No, this update won't allow for Plan Backups. I'll need to chat with the team that owns this and have them enable the feature to non owners.

@Kayla The notification will still come from the Sheet Creator

@Don Young @Julie Becker Thanks for the feedback. We landed on this direction as ownership of the content belongs to the company, not individuals and hiding content from the Admins (in the future) didn't feel right. This was one of the main reasons we went in the direction of separate plans for customers who really needed separation and ensure their main Admins can never access the contents in that plan. This was debated quite a bit and I'm happy to discuss with you offline to get any additional thoughts you have.

@DanMorales No API changes with this release but we do expect API changes in the future.

@Gabriel Barrera I will pass that feedback to the workflows team

@Chris Schuh The email outlined a lot of new features. SAML SSO is separate from this and I'll have the PM take a look at your question

Pawan Shukla

@Chris Schuh If your organization has already set up SAML, you won't need to make immediate changes when the new SAML at domain-level updates roll out. Your current SAML setup will be active until the Smartsheet SAML certificate expiry date. However, it's a good idea to review any new domain-level SSO features as they become available to see if they offer additional benefits for your organization.

DanMorales

Thank you @QuanT 🙏🏼

Kayla

@QuanT - right now, we're able to change the owner so the notifications come from the right person. The person we want notifications to come from is not and will not be the sheet creator. This is going to be a big con and shift for a lot of organizations utilizing the sheet owner as the person who is on the notifications.

What's the suggested work around?

Lekshmi Unnithan

@Kayla - Thanks for sharing your feedback. I've shared this with the Notifications team PM who owns this area. We are looking at further improvements to the "Customize From Name" experience and there may be some opportunity to address this in the future. However, I'll share your feedback with the internal team for the time being.

mgoldstein

Will the original owner (now the Sheet Creator) retain rights to edit/share/etc the sheet as they need?

Samuel Mueller

@Lekshmi Unnithan or @QuanT Can you guys clarify this point in the email that was sent out?

Changes to the user reactivation process post-deprecation: Smartsheet allows customers to deactivate users that have left their organization as a strong security and cost management measure, thereby enabling the reallocation of the deactivated users’ licenses. To further strengthen this capability against the accidental reactivation of deactivated users, we will be imposing a restriction on the ability to reactivate a user (via Admin Center or APIs) 7 days after their deactivation. This 7-day grace period allows SysAdmins to quickly rectify any deactivation errors, while maintaining security beyond that point.

What happens if we rehire that colleague in the future? Or made a mistake and didn't realize it until 2 weeks?

**Edit I found the tip - you can delete or ignore this comment. I don't love the 7 day functionality:

Thank you!

Ella

I completely agree with @Julie Becker and @Don Young ! This would be an issue for us as we have workspaces shared with just a few people and not with all Sys Admins. Am I understanding correctly that after the new change takes place, a Sys Admin can assign himself to any workspace/sheet and have full access?

Julie Fortney

When will these be effective for EAP members? I thought I saw January 10th somewhere, but we still don't have access to assign a plan asset admin.

DonnaT

Who will get access request notifications when a group has admin permissions on an asset? Or more than one user has admin permissions?

ker9

@DonnaT The help article indicates all Admins will get access requests.

Asset ownership help article

I suspect this may be a problem for us. We have hundreds of admins on our workspaces containing hundreds (thousands?) of sheets.

Samuel Mueller

@Julie Fortney your whole org has to be a part of EAP for this particular EAP feature. I ran into the same question

Julie Fortney

@Samuel Mueller The plan asset admin option was enabled for us on Thursday. We're going to assign it to an admin this week and see how it goes.

Samuel Mueller

@Julie Fortney let me know how it goes! We are looking forward to this change.

Julie Becker

@ker9,

I, too, don't agree with this new feature (see image below), as our admins don't understand or know the ins/outs of the program and how accidentally deleting sheets, reports or dashboards can damage so much of the project's set-up, costing time and money to have those who manage the program for the project stop what they are working on to put back all the accidental errors that these new "Asset Admins" did.

We have over 200 people accessing our 12 Workspaces that are linked to each other for 1 project. I am the ONLY person who has done the training/education, therefore I am overseeing the account, building all the sheets/reports/dashboards and granting only "Editor - Cannot Share", or "Viewer" to all our items. Due to this new feature they want to role out (totally against it), I am working on a way to remove the need for Admin rights in our project in order to prevent unnecessary errors that I mentioned above, since it's only me that would have to fix it all.

This image below (IMPORTANT), is what I am mostly concerned about, since our staff tends to not inform me of issues for days or weeks. Most of the time I find out on my own when I personally run a monthly Workspace Check (making sure everything is how it's supposed to be set up, formatting, layouts, access rights, as well as the deleted folder). I have found sheets from prior owners deleted that were not supposed to be in the past, so this is another reason why Admin rights are being removed (unless they get certified in the program).