Sheet ownership

Matt K.

I implemented SS here at the bank over 1 1/2 years ago with little to no knowledge as to how the permissions worked.  As the owner, I started making sheets for department managers and even doled out a few licenses for people who had specific needs.  We are now experiencing growing pains with SS.  We have hundreds of sheets out there with various admins (not sys admins), we have a bunch of sheets that have been created by our 6 licensed users, and we have a bunch of sheets that need to be cleaned up/archived. 

 

I am in dire need of assistance, especially when it comes to sheets owned by licensed users.  I will be honest, it does not make a lot of sense to me to have a team plan that has one owner, and that owner (me) can give out licenses to people and then not be able to have access to the sheets they create.  We have created two additional sys-admins which helps, but when it comes to these sheets created by the licensed users, they are invisible to us.  I realize that they can share the sheet with us so that we can have access but the max access we would get is admin for each respective sheet. 

 

How can I go about undoing this mess?  What makes the most sense?  What happens when licensed users leave the company unannounced?  Help!!

 

Matt

Tim Meeks

Matt,

 

I serve as the primary admin at our agency so I feel some of your angsts.

 

You may have already done all of the below so my apologies if I cover things you've done.

 

I would suggest the following:

0) Contact SS Support or your CSM and see how they can assist.

1) If you haven't, review this link on what a Sys Admin can do. http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/520100-user-types

2) In Account Administration, download the "Sheet Access Report".

3) Identify the sheets owned by licensed users that you want to delete.  

    You can request ownership from the licensed users and then decide if you want to delete OR maybe SS Support can transfer ownership to you.

4) For the licensed users that have left the company, you can do a bulk transfer to your name or someone else. Review the sheets and then delete.

http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/520103-changing-the-sheet-owner#bulk

 

Those are the first things that come to mind.  I'm sure others ahve good suggestions. Doesn't sound like fun. I would first contact SS support. 

 

Hope that helps.  

 

Tim

John Hammond

Tim brings up a good option - download the Sheet Access Report. This will show all sheets owned by members of your account, who they are shared to, and when they were last modified. This can help you determine which sheets are no longer used.

 

In addition to bulk transferring users sheets if they leave the company, you can also bulk remove them from sharing on all sheets owned by members of your team, in the same menu. 

 

As far as a SysAdmin having access to all sheets in the account - I can see how that could be useful. But what if your CEO has a personal sheet with private data. Should you (and all SysAdmins) be able to access that sheet? Or what if HR has a sheet of salaries and bonus information. Should SysAdmins all have access to this sheet? Privacy is a huge concern with newer technologies and I think Smartsheet is correct for NOT giving SysAdmins access to all sheets in an account. 

Matt K.

You both have made great points and I appreciate you taking the time to respond.  I'm going to head down the direction of the sheet access report and go from there.  I also understand the security reasons for sys admins not having access to everything. 

J. Craig Williams

Matt,

 

Once you have the Sheet Access Report, you can go through (manually) and transfer ownership of all (not selective) sheets to another user (Tim's #4)

Typically, this is done when someone leaves the company (I imagine) but when we were experiencing the same growing pains, this was batted around as a possibility - transfer the sheets to one individual, clean them up, and transfer the remaining ones back to the original owner (if necessary).

We decided (for good or bad) to leave things alone. So I don't know what issues the full process may have run into.

 

Stuff just keeps on accumulating, doesn't it?

Craig

 

Matt K.

Thanks, Craig.  We adore SS but stuff like this makes it very difficult to be the company owner on the account (and the one who makes all the sheets sans the licensed users). 

J. Craig Williams

Matt,

 

I feel your pain. I was one of the SysAdmin's where I worked and sometimes it was more than a part time job. At least I had the luxury that we decided to pay for 100+ licenses instead of keeping them limited. 

That is a mixed blessing - as soon there are 100+ standards and lots of other problems to deal with.

 

Craig

KathyH

This whole transfer process is cumbersome. I created a workspace that currently has 25 sheets I also own. I'm in process of transitioning the workspace to a new project mgr to own. 

I want to transfer ownership of 1 workspace and all the sheets owned by me. I do not want to transfer all the multitude of sheets I've created across multiple workspaces I've created.

As I understand it though, the new PM has to go through and manually request to assume ownership of 25 sheets before she can then remove me as owner of the workspace.

Am I missing something? I really hope I am because this is a ridiculous process if correct.

There should be an easy way for individual A to transfer ownership of a workspace and any number of sheets to Individual B without all these hoops.