No Support!

We have 4 users who have the basic Smartsheet account. I am aware there were changes recently, but do not understand the terminology or how it affects us. The employees use the bare basics of Smartsheet - update status of tasks, update their timesheet, or training matrix, or HSE tasks i.e. date, complete. As an SME and the amount of usage cannot justify the cost of a full licence, therefore we opted for the free access. Now these users cannot do anything, which is impacting delivery of projects, payroll cannot process wages, etc. etc. On Friday I reached out to the Technical Support Case#: 09024284,and received a confirmation that the ticket had been received, but noone has contacted me. I reached out to our account manager at the same time, and he passed me over to a new account manager… this seems to happen every year we geta new account manager, which is peculiar in of itself! Chased the new manager yesterday and asked for escalation of the issue resolution. He came back today to redirect me to the Technical Support….!!! where I am getting no response for the urgent request I put in on Friday. In the subject header and the email I asked him to escalate the issue, included the case number, and he literally wrote "Let me know if you need me to escalate anything from the case raised." I do not know how he could not understand that this issue needed to be escalated… I could not log into the support section of the website because the dropdown list does not include UK, and we are not part of the EU, and my passwords did not work if I try to select that option. All the others do not apply. *Edit: Northern America worked!? which enabled me to post this question. Now I am being called by the employees and payroll team asking what is happening and I have no answers because noone at Smartsheet seems to be able to explain what is happening or want to assist! Can anyone advise me on what to do?

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Paul Newcome

If you are on the new User Subscription Model (USM)…

Internal users need a paid license to be able to edit assets directly to include just commenting.

External users do not need a license until they are set as Admin or Owner on an asset.

Having said that…

Internal users can still submit forms and update requests, and interact with/edit Dynamic Views without a paid license.

Paul Newcome

Plan tier on the USM does not change the licensing requirements.

All comments

Paul Newcome

If you are on the new User Subscription Model (USM)…

Internal users need a paid license to be able to edit assets directly to include just commenting.

External users do not need a license until they are set as Admin or Owner on an asset.

Having said that…

Internal users can still submit forms and update requests, and interact with/edit Dynamic Views without a paid license.

Michelle Maas

Thank you, @Paul Newcome - we're on a business plan, does that make any difference to the user accounts?

Paul Newcome

Plan tier on the USM does not change the licensing requirements.

Michelle Maas

Thank you, @Paul Newcome - so looks like we will need to pay for those minimal use user accounts… a lot of money to pay out by an SME. May need to rethink our systems. Appreciate your help with the details.

Michael Chohrach

As @Paul Newcome stated, the new User Subscription Model basically requires everyone to have a paid license if they need to even edit and/or comment on a sheet. The "good ole days" of the free user account being useful to any degree are gone. As indicated by Paul, the only ways to circumvent the paid license requirement to edit existing data in a sheet is to either use an update request, or, if your company has paid for the Dynamic View add-on (which is not cheap), to create a dynamic view against that sheet and grant edit access via that DV. Switching to the new USM caused a very large increase in our company's license costs as we had a very large portion of our organization who had become accustomed to being able to edit sheets directly. Trying to manage these costs going forward has become a challenge and we are devoting a significant amount of effort in changing the way we previously used Smartsheet so we can push more update requirements through the Update Request feature. And, of course, the use of forms to add new rows to a sheet versus just allowing users to directly add rows to the sheet.

Adamcain62

Can you speak more to how the Dynamic View Add-on works? Does this mean people can use a unique 'view' of the sheet in order to edit, but just can't edit the main sheet directly in the entirety with only a 'viewer' license type?

(I can see how this new pricing strategy may increase profits in the short term since companies have content they can't just switch over instantly to another application, but this is going to really reduce the total amount of people exposed to Smartsheet from a general user perspective. e.g., I won't be making 1 sheet that people use for a given periodic task, because the cost won't justify it, so total user base will start to decline, which means folks who might be potential customers won't have exposure, which was really their best 'advertising' strategy in my experience. It was how I was able to grow my internal user base/admin license usage).

Michael Chohrach

That is correct. Dynamic View (DV) allows you to create specific views into the sheet data to dictate which fields can be edited by those individuals who are shared to the DV as editors. You can go so far as to limit which rows of data each user can see, if necessary. This is particularly useful if certain rows are "assigned" to different users and you only want that specific user to make changes to those rows.

Paul Newcome

@Adamcain62

The requirement for users to have a license to edit is for internal accounts.

External accounts only have to be paid for if they are admin or owner.

Dynamic View is an add-on and works pretty much as already stated. They only need to be shared to the Dynamic View itself (do not need any access not even viewer to the underlying data), and they can be on their own free account or added to your account at the free level (just so they have some log in credentials).

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