Confused by users and resources

I'm pretty new to SS, which I've been added to by my project's owner as their preferred tool.

We have set up a high-level schedule with gantt chart to get a top-level idea on estimates. I've assigned tasks to people (adding them as needed) and got a pretty gantt with a critical path, but have no idea how utilised each developer is or if I've 'double booked' people.

Looking at the docs it seems resource management only works for registered users. I don't want/need our developers using SS but am I understanding correctly - I can assign tasks to users but functionality is intentionally broken by design if they're not in SS themselves?
One of my developers does happen to have SS and I've shared sheets with him... but he's not listed as an organisation user. Are these separate things? I have given him edit access even on our sheets without him being listed?!
Having added people by email address to my master schedule, if I did want/have to add them as SS users on the organisation would this happen automatically or would I have to redo the resource allocation? I already have one email address listed twice...

Thanks for any help.

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Comments

Shaine Greenwood

Hello,

In order to be able to track people with the Resource Management functionality in Smartsheet, they must be invited to your organization's account. A SysAdmin on your account can invite them as an unlicensed (free) user. Details on resource management are available in our Help Center: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2026109-resource-management-overview

J. Craig Williams

There is a nuance here that I sometimes exploit:

"they must be invited" but ... they do not need to accept. This means that you can add 'users' that do not exist to track resources for non-persons. For example, use truck01@mytruckingcompany.com to track utilization of trucks.

Smartsheet only allows a specific email address to be a user in a single account. I can not use craig@mycompany.com in more than one account. There is a feature of Gmail that allows email addresses to appear as a single inbox but also as different accounts to outside systems (like Smartsheet) so

me@gmail.com and me+yourcompany@gmail.com and me+othercompany@gmail.com all go to the same inbox but can be used to set up separate accounts in Smartsheet.

I hope that helps.

Craig

JohnD256

Oh, this is refreshingly helpful - I was sure I was going to find out we had to pay $20 per month for each resource we wanted to track, even if they didn't need to ever be in SS.

I'll try to figure this out, the difference between licensed and unlicensed users is somewhat confusing to me in the interface. I can see we have 3 paid seats which are now all full in our organisation, you're saying we can also add unlicensed users? What is the difference - why would we pay for more seats if unlicensed can do what we need?

J. Craig Williams

These two articles are very useful to learn about users and permissions

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/520100-user-types

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/1155182-sharing-permission-levels

The need for licensed users is (to me) basically creation - in order to create Sheets, Forms, Reports, etc... one must be a licensed user. I suggest that there only needs to be one or two 'creators' in each division/department at most and that generally this patterns holds true in reality as well.

There are two sides to this when first trying out Smartsheet -- either give lots of people places to play (more licensed users) or limit the chaos (fewer users). I've seen adoption rates for either case work -- it depends on the org's culture, I believe.

Craig

Mike Wilday

Our organization has 4-5 licensed users who create sheets, the rest of our users are all unlicensed. They have the ability to work in any of the sheets created by our licensed users. There are a lot of features related to setting up a spreadsheet that only a licensed user can do. Change column types, reorganize columns, etc. Only those who NEED the power - should be granted it!

In this article that Craig shared – https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/1155182-sharing-permission-levels – there are several features listed that only licensed admins can do. Unless you are getting complete buy-in from the company and every user will be creating smartsheets you will get by making people unlicensed users.

One point of confusion our unlicensed users face is that when they create their account they are given a trial period of full access where they can create sheets... after that trial period Smartsheets warns them that their trial is expiring without telling them that they can still access everything without a license.

wsguerin

I still find it very clunky to have to makeup email addresses for classes of resources that will never have names. Please allow, like MS Project or Fast Track, the input of generic resources and their attachment to tasks in a one to many framework as I may have one actual engineer who performs many tasks. If I've misunderstood the lack of this feature, do let me know!

don-woodruff

Yeah - I agree. This is so poorly conceived that I honestly am about 30 minutes from recreating in my personal copy of MS Project and sending the file to the people that chose Smartsheet and letting them figure it out. Essentially - to create and track resources - I need an Admin... and the Admin thinks they did what is needed - but I still don't see the resources they created... so here I sit with a broken product and a deadline...