I've been using Smartsheet for a few years now, but recently we have been rolling it out for more serious applications involving collaboration between multiple teams, including external teams and we seem to have come accross a fundamental limitation of Smartsheets, that being the permissions model. For a platform whose reason to exist is collaboration this has surprised us.
We are using smartsheet to collect data on subcontractor activities, which relate to cases so that we can produce bills to our client.
We have multiple subcontractors, and ideally we would like to have them enter their cases into a single sheet (via a form), and then allow them to review their activities (and attach paperwork) before submitting for approval.
Reports seem to be designed for this use case, so we can produce a report which shares only those columns and rows that we want to share, with each specific contractor. They each have their own filtered report - bingo - except that to view any data they need to have access to the underlying sheet which means they can see everyboidy's cases. Worse, to change their own records they need to be an editor, which means that they can edit entries from other contractors as well. We clearly can't have that.
Insisting that report users have access to the underlying sheets is the problem here and I'm sure was designed to fix a problem, but in doing so has made Smartsheets unsuitable as a tool to collaborate with external teams. The two solutions I have read up on are the a "security by obscurity" method, where we try to hide the original worksheet and hope no-one goes looking for it. We ruled that one out pretty quickly. That leaves b), partitioning the data by setting up an identical sheet for each contractor. This method means we have multiple sheets to maintain - every change has to be done 5 times, and also makes the collection formulas ridiculously and unecessarily complex.
A seemingly unrelated issue, but actually one that goes to the core of collaborative working, is that all editors are equal in Smartsheet. We want to restrict what external teams can edit - like the approval status on their activities for example, whilst allowing our internal teams to change this. The only way to do this is have our internal people assigned as admins, which means they can accidentally break forumulas.
We love Smartsheet and have a huge amount of time invested in it, but it seems that as long as we were developing low-grade applications to solve small-scale problems in individual departments it was fine. As soon as we have stareted developing more serious business applications we appear to have outgrown it very quickly.
Any plans to overhaul the permissions structure Smartsheet? or do we need to go and find something else?
