Alerts to non-shared resources

Matthew Moran

We are trying to implement an editorial calendar.

 

Smartsheet works great for this in theory.. ie: we have the primary row as an calculation that shows us: "Client (Content Type) Title (Creator name)" - perfect. this is awesome.

 

We have the due date as the calendar date. - Again.. perfect.

 

HERE IS THE CHALLENGE

We have writers/content creators who CANNOT have access to the entire sheet. In fact, I don't want them to access the sheet at all.

 

I've created a field for their name (Creator name) and a (Creator email) field.

 

I want an alert that goes out 3 days prior to (Due date), 1 day prior to (Due date), and on (Due date) to any (Creator email). 

 

Otherwise, this is a manual process.. which is painful.

 

In the idea scenario, these would be "row update" requests. And if a content creator has multiple items due, they'd receive a single email.

 

Thoughts/advice?

 

 

Travis

Matthew - Check out this post where a user asked a similar question: https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/reminders-unshared-outside-people

 

In that thread, Robin (Smartsheet Product Manager) explains one of the reasons we only send alerts to shared users is that it could be abused for spam.  Alerts are something they are considering to improve upon in future releases. 

 

 

It may be possible you could use Zapier to email alerts to users not shared to the sheet. Zapier is a service which utilizes our API to perform automated actions. If you had a column in your sheet that contained a formula that will display “Send” (for example) if *today* is 3 days prior to the Due Date, then you can set up a “Zap” that (when a row is updated and the selected columns contains Send), can email the contents of that row to an email addressed entered in another column in that row. Check out zapier.com for more information. 

Matthew Moran

Thanks.. I'll check it out. 

 

As far as abuse concerns, I can't image that is a real concern given the nature of the app.. ie: If you see hundreds of emails generated from a single account, it would be fairly simply to spot and stop before it was an issue.

 

I'm looking at the API but, at this point, I don't know if I want to develop something.

 

The need to auto-update people who are NOT necessarily a full-editor on a sheet is fairly significant. It would greatly simplify the delegation of tasks to outside resources who have no need for full-sheet access.

 

The ability to specify multi-row update request to an email already exist. The ability to alert "assigned to" fields on pre-determined times based on specific dates exist..

 

So.. now a function combining something like that.. hmmm

J. Craig Williams

Matthew,

 

Did you ever solve this problem?

I have the same one now and don't want to reinvent the wheel.

 

Thanks.

 

Craig

Tim Meeks

^^^^^^^

 

or Ditto

 

As my teenager tells me the up arrow signs, mean I agree with the above posts.

 

Tim

Tim Meeks

Craig,

 

Not sure of your application, but for my case,  

 

I want to send a Reminder email to 85 users to key time weekly into a webform for a project.  All of the users are internal but only 10-15 are already Smartsheet users (licensed or collaborators.) Sr Management wants to keep this simple and not have everyone be required to have a Smartshee login to submit time. 

 

What I’ve done is create a User Setup Sheet (sheet #1) to store the user data (dept, name & email). A Reminder alert will be set on sheet #1. Then I'm putting the webform URL of the 2^nd sheet where the data is going in the Reminder alert message.  I am planning on setting up the users in a Contact List column and the Reminder Alert message will contain a link to the webform.  

 

 

I'll let you know if issues.

 

Tim

 

 

J. Craig Williams

Thanks Tim.

 

Craig