Best practices for using and managing contacts outside of my organization

danfritts

I am fairly new to smartsheet and struggling with the best practices for managing collaborators. While our organization will have about 50 users internal, we will be sharing with 100s of users outside of our organization. Since you have to be a "user" to be included in a group, I assumed the best practice would be to add all the people outside of my organization to my "user" contacts so I could utilize groups to share sheets and workspaces with them. For example, i would like to take a group and share a few of the sheets within a workspace only with them. I need to be able to update these groups with additional users as time goes on. This seemed like the correct approach until I received a message telling me that in order for them to join my account, they must ask their system administrator to first remove them. This in turn told me that anyone with an account already under someone else, could not be added as a user under me thus could not be added to a group. Also, by adding them in this manner, my organization would be their system administrator. Therefore, I am trying to better understand how to best manage access to individual sheets without retyping emails and invites as well as without comparing access across multiple sheets visually. Seems like it shouldn't be this complicated but would really appreciate how others manage this.

Brian_Richardson

Hi Dan, you can add external emails to your groups as long as your system administrator has allowed it. There's a setting in the Admin Security and Controls called "Groups" with the following options:

- People in your account & external contacts

or - Only people in your account.

As long as the first one is selected (and it's selected by default) then you can simply type out the full email address of the external user when adding them to a group. Note that it won't pop their email up to "select" when entering them in the user addition box in group management, but just type out the email and hit enter to add them.

You do not need to add the external users to your Users list. That adds them to your account, and as you noted you have to "take over" their account from another account to do that. You don't want to do that.

If Groups only allows people in your account, then you're out of luck for group management. Your fallback option is to add them individually to sharing, or publish your content and provide a link. Publishing gets a little dicey though, as those published links can be used by anyone, you no longer have insight or control over who is using it. And it has to be enabled in system admin settings…which if your groups are locked down, is unlikely.