Add specific users to all new Smartsheet?

Andy Brittain

Hi everyone

 

Is there a facility that I can't find... if not its an enhancement request.

 

Can you automatically add specific users or groups of users to new Smartsheets created?

 

Regards

 

Andy

JohnHinkle

This can be done with the Groups feature (Team/Enterprise accounts). Account Group Admins can create a group with as many members as they would like then they can share sheets to that group. 

 

Here's info on groups: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1554165-managing-groups-team-enterprise-only-

Andy Brittain

Thanks John, I have groups setup but users keep forgetting to add that group when creating sheets. I was looking for a way to automatically do this.

 

Andy

J. Craig Williams

Andy,

 

There is also the Workspace feature.

Any sheet added to the Workspace currently* has the sharing permissions of the Workspace.

http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/522067-workspace-sharing

 

*currently because there are changes coming and I don't know how they will impac this answer.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Craig

 

Andy Brittain

Thanks Craig

 

I had played with Workspaces but two problems exist with this in my scenario.  One sheet can't appear in more than one workspace... and you can't change the security of a sheet in a workspace without it affecting all sheets in the workspace.

 

We share our sheets with customers so workspaces don't work because the sheet inherits the security at this level.

 

What I need is an enhancement to default a group or individual users to every sheet and then I could invite customers to the relevavant ones.

 

Andy

J. Craig Williams

Andy,

 

For sharing sheets to customers issue, what we came up with was having a customer workspace and then publishing the sheets we wanted/needed to share with them.

 

We added a sheet outside of the workspace and shared that sheet with the customer.

In the sheet was a "map" of the workspace with the published links.

The customer only had to go to their map sheet and then to whatever sheets they were looking for (schedule, contact lists, etc...)

 

Hope that was clear and helps the second problem.

 

I'm having a difficult time thinking of the case where you want sheets in more than one workspace. This sounds familar but maybe we found a work-around. Can you give me an example?

 

Craig

 

Andy Brittain

Hi Craig

 

Thanks for your input.  Here is an example of my difficulty:

 

 - Our company operations manager needs to be added to all Smartsheets (there are more people but lets keep it simple).

 - We have multiple customers but will focus on just one for this.

 - We create a workspace for ACME Corp and add our operations manager to this as well as the customer contacts.

 - I create various Smartsheets and place in to the workspace and everything is OK.

 - Now my problem... I create a Smartsheet that we don't want to share with the customer... I have to remember to add the Operations manager but where do I put it? Smartsheet folders are per user, I could create another "Non customer" workspace but his seams overkill and I stand a big chance of someone putting a Smartsheet in the wrong one.

 - If I could place one sheet in multiple workspaces it would work.  Customers would get a standard folder structure for them and the same would apply for  my internal users.

 

Andy

J. Craig Williams

Andy,

 

Forgive me if I over simplify.

If there are people (customers) that have access to a limited set of sheets and another group of people (employees) that have access to those plus others, instead of trying to solve the problem of how to add the extras for the second group, it might be easier to solve the problem of limiting the first group.

 

I would try visuallizing the various permissions using a Venn diagram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram)

and see what comes out.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Craig