Workspace Organization Best Practice

Lona Kicinski

I'm new to this and am in the middle stages of setting up Smartsheet. My goal for implementation is end of Feb (or earlier). When it comes to workspaces and accesses, I can't decide the best way to organize for the team. To many editors "in the kitchen" is what I'd like to avoid. I'm considering setting up an Admin workspaces for Portfolio and Projects accessed by the boss, me, and possibly supervisors with everything (related reports, intake sheets, dashboards, metadata and other) except the individual project plans. Project plans (only) will be in the shared workspaces - Helpdesk, Infrastructure, Procurement - and commenter permission given to the members of the individual workspaces. Certain reports and dashboards permission can be given as needed. Is there a reason I shouldn't do this? Is this the best idea you ever heard? Haha. What are best practices in your experiences? I'd love to collaborate with someone.

Kerry St. Thomas

TL;DR - WorkApp. If you can deploy a WorkApp in your plan… yeah, do that. 😀 It makes maintaining permissions SO much more easy - especially if you have different access levels you want to maintain (e.g. "Individual Contributor", "Leadership", "Admin/Development" or whatever). AND… it solves a maddening problem (WITHOUT a WorkApp, a person must be shared to underlying sheet/s in order to see and/or edit those data on a report - WITH a WorkApp… only the report needs to be shared).

If you do not have access to WorkApps… I try to use three layers. At the "top" level, there's Dashboards that are used by the people shared to the workspace - basically, that's the level that's end-user facing. There's a subfolder called "Admin" that I would basically train people to read as "Yeah, keep your snoot out of this section, No Fair Peeking." Inside that Admin folder, I divide things up with the end result in mind: "Data" as one subfolder holding the underlying data if it's consolidated to a single workspace, and "Dashboard Assets." Inside Data is the schema - sheet templates, archives, etc. All of it with folder organization. Inside the Dashboard Assets is a folder for EACH item surfaced on the Dashboard, holding each step to distilling the data for a dash. (Report, Pivot, Report.) There's also a "Shared" folder - in case there's more than one dashboard widget based on the same data subset.

I know, it's super convoluted. But at least it's one way of looking at organization. I really don't think there's one CORRECT answer; it's all dependent on what works for your business case. But - and I can't say this strongly enough - investigate WorkApps!