Introducing Automated Workflows and Recurrence

Shaine Greenwood

Community—

We've introduced automated workflows, which make it easier than ever to build, manage, and collaborate on Smartsheet automation. You can now:

Consolidate multiple automated actions into sophisticated workflows, including multi-step approval processes

Address a variety of scenarios in a single workflow with multiple conditional paths

View your entire workflow at once rather than across many separate rules

We also rolled out recurrence so you can now set up your time-based workflows to repeat on your preferred schedule. For example, request updates on all incomplete work items once a week on Monday at 9am.

All of your existing rules have been turned into workflows with the above capabilities. If you do nothing, they’ll continue to run as usual, but you can also add more actions and conditions and set up recurrence at any time. 

To manage your workflows or create a new one, open the Automation menu (formerly called the Alerts & Actions menu).

Learn about three quick ways to take advantage of these new capabilities.

Then get all the details in the Smartsheet Learning Center.

 

Andrée Starå

Hi Shaine,

Wow! Just Wow! 

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå - Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Shaine Greenwood

Hope those are wows of enjoyment!

Andrée Starå

Of course! 

Erin.M.

I'm confused. I thought this was supposed to let us set recurring workflows, but it seems like it just sets up recurring alerts and our definitions of workflow are different? If I have a meeting that needs to be duplicated for every Wednesday, or if I have series of data calls that occur at daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly intervals, I want to be able to set those duplications. I don't need to send alerts to anyone, I just want to make those tasks automatically duplicate themselves without having to copy/paste a couple hundred rows every day. 

I was really hyped about this update, but it doesn't seem to do what I thought it would.

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Erin—

We don't currently have the ability to create or duplicate a row and its data automatically. (They must be manually copied and pasted in your sheet at this time.)

When you have a moment, please submit a Product Enhancement Request using the form under Quick links on the right of the community site.

sarshad

These are really helpful - especially the option to add concurrent conditions is a game changer. Streamlined a lot of our workflows.

hana.lee73416

Hello,

If I set the change action like below with "Run workflow:Daily", how the recurrence occurs?

lets say, the requests come in at 9am, 11am, 3pm, 4pm, 9pm on the day, how the run works on the day and next day?

Thanks,

Hana

Vardellic

I completely agree with Erin here. I am following threads that go back to 2016 with people clearly requesting this feature (https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/recurring-tasks-set) and its very dissappointing that after all the wait and hype, you still can't create a weekly/monthly/etc reoccuring task in a single row. 

...goes back to MS Project...

Andrée Starå

Hi Hana,

Here's some info.

• Workflows set to run daily will evaluate changes to the sheet and execute between 12:00 AM and 11:59 PM in the sheet Owner’s timezone and messages will be delivered between 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM the next day. 

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Nick Burrus

This is amazing! Looking forward to see automations improve! 

hanseric

What about situations where a sheet is missing important information? Can Automation be used to keep an eye out for that and notify someone?

Example: I have a sheet to track the expiration dates of certain domains which, if expired, would cause an outage.

For the notifications to go out, I need Expiration Date filled out by various stakeholders (who I have in the Assigned To column) who distributed throughout our enterprise.

I want automation which goes and looks periodically (daily, weekly, monthly) to see "which which rows have no Exp Date" and then send a notification to the guy/gal in Assigned To reminding them to update that.

But it seems like the only way to make automation happen is if there is a change/add to the sheet, vs. just on some timed basis. We may not add/change a row on this sheet for a while and I need this triggered based on time, not an add/change.

So I'm not sure how to set that up...

Andrée Starå

Hi,

You'd use the Custom Recurrence feature when the trigger selected is When a date is reached. You can set it to repeat Daily/Weekly/Monthly and Yearly with patterns.

Would that work?

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Andrée Starå

More info: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2479396-ensure-continuous-project-execution-with-recurring-automation

Douglas Ashby

Is it possible to set an automation rule so it doesn't pull duplicate entries? So let's say the rule is set to look everyday for dates in the next 90 days. As is, it is pulling the same entries over and over again.

How can I avoid this?

Paul Newcome

Setup another day column that has a formula such as

=[Original Date Column]@row + 90

This will generate a date 90 days from the original date.

Then you can set your workflow to run off of this new date column.