Changing the owner on sheets owned by Smartsheet Service Account

Pamela Wagner

We have encountered an issue that when someone has left the company and a ticket was not put in to our internal Smartsheet SysAdmin to move their sheets specifically to another person as the owner, that those existing sheets will default to "Smartsheet Service Account". Once that happens you cannot move those to another person to own, you have to open the sheet and do a save as in order to take control of it that way but that original sheet will stay in your Sheets folder. Has anyone found a way to get these moved to a specific Workspace and get it moved to a different owner? We have found that hundreds of these sheets are now in our Director's Sheets folder and no way to get them moved.

kowal

hi @Pamela Wagner,

Did you open the ticket with Smartsheet Support to assign those Sheets to the proper owner or SysAdmin in your organization?

Pamela Wagner

@kowal Unfortunately, no. We didn't realize this until it was too late and now we have a mess. I do have SysAdmin access but another department manages the application for our organization. I think that they were originally told, Bob is rolling off, please move his sheets to Karoline but we never specified to move them to her so that she was the owner. Either that or Bob had already rolled off and we needed to put his sheets somewhere to we told them to move them to Karoline. Not sure of the specific instance in how this actually happened. But now Karoline has hundreds of sheets and we can't determine an easy way to move them to Josh (or others) so he can be the new owner and not have all those sheets in Karoline's account.

However, are you stating that we can, now, ask Smartsheet support to move those sheets?? The SysAdmin in our organization stated they did not know how to do that. If I (since I'm also a SysAdmin) can be told how to do this, I am happy to assist!

kowal

hi @Pamela Wagner,

So if the assets of people leaving your company or whose licenses of Smartsheet were removed were always assigned to Karoline in her Sheets folder on the top all the sheets that were assigned to different people are kept in Folders so there should be folders like: Sheets of Bob, Sheets of Josh etc.

But yeah looks like big mess you have now unfortunately.

What you can try to do is to go to the User Management and create the Sheet Access report it will send to your Email a CSV file with the access of all the Assets in your organization. I just checked mine and I can see that it shows in my case what sheet belong to peopele who already left the company years ago so maybe with some Pivot Table magic you can play with this CSV.

Pamela Wagner

@kowal, perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment but the issue is not - where do these sheets currently live but how do we change the owner. Karoline can see all of these sheets in her master Sheets folder. What we need to do now is change the owner on them to other people so that they can be moved out of her Sheets folder completely and that others can now take control over them. What we are looking for is the ability for me or another SysAdmin to get those sheets out of her Sheet's folder and into someone elses. Right now it seems that we are being told that there is no way to even delete those sheets at all and that they will live in her Sheet's folder forever.

kowal

hi @Pamela Wagner,

i know it will be a lot of extra work for Karoline but she can change the ownership of each sheet individually.

or it is not doable?

Pamela Wagner

@kowal that is the whole issue - it does not allow an individual to change an owner on one of these sheets since it's owned by the Smartsheet Service Account. It would be like her trying to take ownership of one of my sheets. Since the Smartsheet Service Account owns the sheet, only it can change the owner to someone else. Problem is - just who is the Smartsheet Service Account??!

kowal

@Pamela Wagner and smartsheet support does not want to help you with that? It seems like the sheets are owned now by their default account.

Pamela Wagner

@kowal in the past, no. I will put in another ticket and see if anything has changed.