Does anyone else find Collections worthless?

ckcalvins

I find Collections worthless, and am wondering if others feel the same. If these are replacing WorkApps I have so many questions.

The biggest gap by far (IMO) are managed references. If the whole point of Collections is to control access and only share certain things, then this is not going to work for me.

For example, I create a Collection in a workspace and give access only to the Collection to colleague "X". Inside of a sheet/report within the Collection, I have formulas that call on managed references outside of the Collection (sometimes a completely separate Workspace). These cells will now error for those only shared to the Collection.

So how am I to understand this concept? You can curate views and share things, so long as they don't have references to dimensional data I call upon from other sources? I basically need to give each of those folks access to those admin/data shuttle Workspaces I didn't want them having in the first place, so they can view properly inside the Collection?

I didn't have this problem with WorkApps. I don't have this problem in Workspaces in general. These managed references do not error for my colleagues, even if they don't have access to the source. Only Collections, removing (IMO) the whole value proposition right off the bat.

Not to mention the fact that they aren't easy to find unless you click into a sheet within a workspace or favorite the link. Why not just put it into the browse area like they did recently with forms? Allow you to favorite? Something? Damn.

So, what gives? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Darren Mullen

@ckcalvins I have the save sentiment at this point. In fact, I did a session in my Smartsheet Guru Elite program that went over the limitations of collections and how they are hard to find, etc. My members tend to have the save sentiment as well.

If they really do end up replacing workapps, there is still a bit of work to do.

I haven't found a good use case for them in production solutions. I suppose for really close knit teams they might work ok… but for the clients I build for.. not so much.