Future Developments

Will Kidwell

I am a new user to Smartsheet.  Still testing it out for the 30-Day Trial.

 

I really like Smartsheet, but am a bit concerned about becoming too involved with it because it does lack some functionality I was hoping for.  That said, only a few of the upper end (expensive) project management programs seem to do what I want.

 

There are three things that seem to be missing:

 

1.) Ability to set a baseline, track actual performance stats against the baseline, and do a variance analysis of progress between actual vs projected goals.

 

2.) A clock for scheduling.  Right now, Smartsheet will look at days, hours and mins, but it doesnt seem to let one schedule start and stop times for particular within a particular day.  This is actually a pretty basic feature in day planners and calendars, so maybe I am missing something...

 

3.) What I'll call a "Project Journal", which would basically be a document organizer, or document management system, possibly with version control.  Smartsheet already has the ability to upload and manage documents, which is functionality I am still learning, but it seems pretty basic for what I have seen so far.

 

All that said, Smartsheet is really a sweet system, and I wonder if there are plans to add in any of this type of functionality?

 

Thank you!

 

wm

 

J. Craig Williams

Will,

 

I can't answer for Smartsheet, but you can always see what's coming soon here:

https://www.smartsheet.com/product-roadmap

 

In addition, Travis is the Smartsheet Community Manager and is on daily if not more often. He passes all enhancement requests to the development team. They get on here too to keep an eye out for feature requests.

 

For (1), I set up this manually, saving the start and end date columns for later comparisons. Another column or two for the variance and you get pretty much what you need if not what you want. I do the same with the cost.

 

For (3), I like Smartsheet's simplicity for documentation control. I've worked with two very expensive systems for doc control and for both heard nothing but complaints from other users. When you upload a document, Smartsheet will version it if it has the same name as one already uploaded in the same place or create a new instance (it will ask you). I really like that. 

And attachments can be in three places - workspaces, sheets, or rows. 

It also syncs with Google Docs, which might be worth a look.

 

Hope this helps.

Craig

 

Travis

Hi Will, happy to hear you are testing out Smartsheet! We are always working to improve the product and I will make sure I pass your feedback along. We do plan on adding additional scheduling tools in the future although I am not exactly sure how they will function. 

 

As a workaround for a couple of these, Craig mentioned a good workaround for baseline. Clock scheduling, you can add a Text/Number column and manually track start and end times for tasks. For the file organizer, we do integrate with Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte - which do support file structures. You could build the structures in one of these services then link the files to sheets as needed through our integration.