Superuser administrator access

jprovo227

I'm the system administrator for several digital tools in my company's IT department - including Smartsheet. I am Core Product certified and have been the Smartsheet system admin since 2023.

As I have taken on SysAdmin duties in other applications (such as Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, qTest, Vera, Datadog, and other apps), I noticed that all of these applications have easy to configure System Administrator privileges that grants sweeping access across the applications as a superuser. This is helpful when troubleshooting permissions issues, performing user management tasks, implementing automations, designing solutions for end users, and creating various reports for leadership about activities across the enterprise.

When we started our Enterprise agreement with Smartsheet, another department (outside of IT) in our organization already had been using Smartsheet for a few years. After implementing what is now referred to as Advanced Work Management in our IT PMO, I have sweeping access of only a fraction of our Smartsheet assets.

There are roughly 50,000 assets in our Smartsheet account today across 300 paid members - many of which existed before we scaled our use of Smartsheet across the organization and purchased our Enterprise package. While I can try to work with end-users to request that they grant access to a System Admin group to achieve the sweeping access - it seems strange that this feature, which is common in many other apps, is not available in Smartsheet.

This leaves me with a few questions that I hope the community can help to answer:

1. Is there a 3rd party plugin that provides superuser access? (I could not find one, but perhaps I missed something)
   
2. Has anyone else experienced a similar issue? If so, what were some of the ways that you solved for the lack of sweeping access?
   
3. What are the best practices for having superuser access in Smartsheet? Can they be implemented after assets have been created by hundreds of users?

Thanks,
Justin

Adrien Leduc

Based on my experience as a superadmin:

1. You won't ever get access to everything from your users, short of forcing the transfer user by user in the admin section, but if one user has access to a lot, the transfers end up failing a lot.
2. Make sure going forward that all permissions are handled via groups (you will need to communicate a lot, and potentially remove sharing rights to some people), and in every group make sure there is a generic "sysadmin" or "smartsheetadmin" user which you have acces to.
3. There are essentially two places sheets are stored: users folders (1 per user), which you should really ignore as this is "their" stuff, and workspaces. If you're going from 0 or close, you need to build a "workspace management policy" so only the workspaces that you know and manage are "allowed", the others can still exist, but it's like the personal folders, you could decide to ignore them, as long as people are not storing anything used in operations in there, in which case you'll have to ask users to transfer the items to the correct workspaces.
4. To help you with that, there should be a report of where the sheets are stored in in the admin interface. I advise you to add a prefix or suffic in the "Offial" workspaces" so you can filter these out easily and see the "illegal" worspaces and sheets recently used.

It's far from perfect I agree, feel free to use the feedback form and countact your CSM/Account Manager.