Dashboard Sharing Best Practice

Protonsponge

I've have a 3-tiered solution, with projects nested within programs, and programs within a single portfolio, all managed by control centre. At the portfolio level, there's a unified dashboard, providing the ability to navigate to any of the six program-level dashboards. Each program-level dashboard then presents multiple projects associated with the program.

Ideally, I want all individuals under the company license to have the ability to have view access to any dashboard, starting at the portfolio level and navigating down to the specific project. To achieve this, I believe the most effective approach would be to publish each dashboard with the setting "Only available to users on the same Smartsheet plan as this item."

Managing the manual publishing of all these links and replacing them in my intake sheet, currently published by the control centre, would be burdensome.

I'm am looking for your thoughts on alternative ways to handle this.

Creating a group with everyone's email won't work for me, as individuals may not want to see hundreds of dashboards in their workspace.

I'm wondering if control centre can generate a published link upon provisioning and put it into my intake sheet?

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

SoS | Dan Palenchar

Hello @Protonspounge,

Sounds like you have a nice CC configuration set up.

In general URLs of future assets are tricky to work with as they literally do not exist until they have been created. As far as I know there is no way to natively publish an asset, grab that link, and stick it in a column.

I do think the best solution would be to create a group with all users and update your CC blueprint to provision access to that group.

If you really want to go the published route it is probably something that could be done with the API (we have replaced form links this way). Please reach out if you're interesting in getting some help with this.

Paul Newcome

You initially mentioned that you wanted your people to be able to drill down to any project, but then you also mentioned about not wanting people to see a bunch of dashboards in their workspace. When I develop solutions for my clients, I generally try to avoid users having to navigate to any workspace directly. I try to provide all necessary shortcuts on dashboards and whatnot.

Auto-publishing can be managed by the API, but honestly it may not necessarily be the best route.

Protonsponge

@Paul Newcome / @SoS | Dan Palenchar - thank you both for the reply, I appreciate it.

@Paul Newcome - I am looking as you say to not have everyone need to navigate directly to a workspace and manage everything via links from my portfolio view. Equally, I don't want to have to maintain lots of access requests. Based upon this is my best approach to manually create the published links and add them in to my shortcuts?

Thank you again, very grateful for your insight.

SoS | Dan Palenchar

@Protonspounge,

If you are outputting your Dashboard link via CC and share it to all users this could serve as the basis for an easy way for users to navigate without having to publish Sheets or look through all the workspaces.

You could simply have people navigate to the intake Sheet or a report built off of it and find the Dashboard they want. You could also nest this based on program, add other criteria for filters etc.

Paul Newcome

@Protonspounge In instances such as this, you can share all dashboards to all users through a central group shared to the workspace and ensure that navigation remains in the dashboards. Links to the individual project level dashboards can be provided via a form that is fed by your Summary sheet that already houses the automatically created links (if you set CC to provide the link to a dashboard as opposed to a project plan or some other item).

There are a number of other options as well to include having the initial sharing done by Control Center (additional sharing would still be manual), or using the API to publish each dashboard and drop the published link somewhere. I have done a number of different setups to varying degrees of effectiveness. Overall though, I do try to avoid manual anything, and I try to avoid publishing anything when possible.

Do you have access to any premium apps, or are you limited to the core product only?

Protonsponge

Thank you @Paul Newcome great insights, appreciate the detailed reply. I have access to everything except bridge I believe… bridge would be needed for the API solution is that correct?

Paul Newcome

Bridge is not needed for the API solution. Bridge was designed as a more user friendly / accessible interface to the API, but it is not required to utilize the API.

Protonsponge

@Paul Newcome - I am coming back to this after discovering that published links are not a great solution.

In your previous reply to mentioned - "In instances such as this, you can share all dashboards to all users through a central group shared to the workspace and ensure that navigation remains in the dashboards. Links to the individual project level dashboards can be provided via a form that is fed by your Summary sheet that already houses the automatically created links (if you set CC to provide the link to a dashboard as opposed to a project plan or some other item)."

I currently have project blueprint linked to a parent in Control Centre, with the project storage set to "Parent Project Work Space" I want to really limit the number of people accessing the sheets/reports but maximise the number of people that can view the dashboards.

Is there an automated way to have the dashboard put in a separate shared work space to the underlying project folder structure? (Note - current project dashboards >150)

I have a large audience (>900 people) to share dashboard with but I only want very limited people will need to touch the sheets/reports. Your suggestion to add the dashboards in to a central group shared to the workspace could be an option for me to give access and I could then have all the shortcuts on a top-tier portfolio level dashboards.

Grateful for any guidance,

Protonsponge