How do I revoke an individual publication of a sheet?

Dietrich Koch

Hi, how do I revoke the publication of a sheet for certain people after having sent the link?

 

Example:

Two vendors shall be enabled to work together with me on a sheet showing issues within the project. I do not want to gain access to the whole workspace but I do want them to get the whole picture on the issues currently existing and work together on it. To achieve this I would send them a publishing link to the sheet. 

 

But what if one of the two vendor changes within the project? How can I revoke his "free access" to the page? I understood, that I can revoke the complete publishing of a sheet by turning publication of, but this also kicks out the vendor that should have remained... 

 

Would that be the way? Turning of publication completely, start publishing again and then send the NEW publication link to the remaining vendor?

 

Thanks

Dietrich

J. Craig Williams

Dietrich,

 

Formerly, to do this, one had to turn published link off, RENAME the sheet, and then turn it back off in order to invalidate the link.

(And thus, send the link to the people who should see it)

 

At least two features on the roadmap

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

that might change this, so watch for updates there (coming soon according to comments from Smartsheet employees)

 

What I have done in the past is create a specific sheet for a specific vendor.

On that sheet are the links to the sheets I want them to see/use.

This is sheet is shared to one vendor. 

When that vendor should not have access to that sheet, I revoke their sharing on that sheet. The other vendor(s) never know or deal with the new link.

Slight security hole there as the vendor could have copied the link from the sheet to know what it is, but if I didn't trust them that far, I wouldn't do business with them.

 

Craig

 

 

Dietrich Koch

Craig,

 

thanks for your tips!

Ok, so let's wait and see what the new features will bring ;-)

 

I hope, that we will have the ability to give different acces levels on folders within a workspace. That would be a great feature...

 

Dietrich

J. Craig Williams

Agreed and you are welcome.

 

Mit freundlichen Gruessen,

 

Craig

Travis

Hi Dietrich! Our latest updated included the ability to share individual sheets in a workspace - without sharing the entire workspace. Check out our blog for more information: https://www.smartsheet.com/blog/new-workspace-sharing-options

Dietrich Koch

Hey Travis,

 

great feature!

 

I played around with it and have a question:

When I share a sheet - the user who now gets access to it (and no longer to the whole workspace), finds it in the sheet area in his smartsheet account. How can he identify where this sheet comes from / belongs to?

 

Given that this user works in several projects and gets the same e.g. calculation sheet or project plan (name of the sheet is due to a template always the same) from the different projects/workspaces - how can he distinct between those projects, so that he would not have to open every sheet to find the correct one?

 

I think this would not mean a problem, if the newly accessible sheet would not move (or linked?) to the sheet area but stays in the different workspaces and only the other sheets of the workspace would get invisible for him. 

 

Maybe its a sole problem of how we use smartsheet ;-)

We have set up a bunch of sheets within a workspace where we have a base set of forms, plans and budgetsheets with cell-linking, reports, dashboards....

Every new project gets a copy of this workspace and the copied workspace is renamed to the projects name. So the calculation sheet for example has the same name in all the workspaces. We did so in order to easily collect those sheets in PMO dashboards. Due to that - in the end every user working for different projects with limited access will run into a situation described above and could not distinct between the sheets he finds in his sheet area...

 

Do you have an idea to avoid that?

 

Best

Dietrich

J. Craig Williams

Dietrich,

 

Good points.

For my team, we went the other way (pre-workspace update) and renamed all of the sheets from the master templates based on the project name

"AAAA schedule" instead ''schedule"

We did this to aid searching (using the search feature) and for archiving of past projects. We did (struggle to) come up with a naming convention for the various sheets and folders, but it worked in the end.

I use the Search tool a lot, so this was a natural choice for me. I can see the advantages to the other way too.

 

Craig

Travis

Dietrich - when you share just a sheet from a workspace, it will act just like sharing any other sheet and will show up and behave like any other shared sheet.

 

If you want to organize the sheets to better identify them, I would suggest the user create folders and add the sheets to the appropriate folder. You might consider adding a suggested folder name in the message body of the sharing email (maybe the workspace name), to give them an indicator of where the sheet should live. 

Dietrich Koch

Travis - proceeding as you suggest becomes "difficult" as soon as you have the company management e.g. as steering committee within the numerous projects and force them to start with creating folders...

 

Perfect would be IMHO if you could create folders within your project workspace (as you can do today) but give different accesslevels to these folders or files within the folders.

 

So if someone logs in into smartsheet he would see the different workspaces but within the workspaces only those folders/files he's allowed to see...

Travis

Thanks for the feedback! As this is a new feature, I know our Product team will be interested in hearing this! 

Dietrich Koch

Take it as a vote for this feature! 

 

It would make life much easier for those people managing the templates respectively rolling them out as a new project workspace and at least for everyone who is taking part in several projects...

 

Although I do not expect many people to follow this threat down to the end (since the discussion turned in a totally different direction in regards to its header), I hope many others will also vote for it

 

Thanks

Dietrich