Reminders to Unshared (Outside) People

We have a sheet that has the insurance information for each of our franchises, including renewal date and email address of the Franchisee. We'd love for Smartsheet's alerts to send a reminder to the Franchisee 60 days before renewal, however, I don't want to share the sheet to every Franchisee.

Does anyone know of a work-around for getting Smartsheet to send a reminder to someone that isn't shared to the entire sheet?

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Comments

Matt K.

It looks as though it's restricted to only shared users: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/542913-using-reminders

"Reminders can only be created for, and by, collaborators who are shared to the sheet."

Matt K.

It would be tedious but you could set up a reminder for yourself, or someone else that is shared to the sheet, to "send row" to an external source on a specific day.

D Domine

Thnks, Matt. We've been doing the reminder thing and then sending it manually. I even looked at sending Update Requests since that can go to unshared users, but Smartsheet doesn't have the option to send every 'x' months or quarterly or annually. Bummer.

Robin Sherwood

As we start researching enhancements to our notificiations features, one of the requests we have heard is to notify "non-shared contacts" This makes a lot of sense for people that are within your org or have active accounts, but may not be shared to a specfic sheet. However, one of the concerns we have had about "notify anyone" is the potential for it to be abused to spam people. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Could we limit notifications to verified collaborators? So If you want to be able to send notifications to a vendor they would have to go through some kind of email validation to recieve it? Would this work for your use case?

Thanks!

Robin

Beth Kennedy

For us, the notifications feature to "non shared contacts" would be helpful and I think your suggestion to "limit" to verified collaborators would work for us.

I also agree with D Domine that the send every "x" months would be helpful. Right now I have a user that is frustrated that I have smartsheet notifiy every week, but the notification is sent out on Thursday night, rather than Sunday night. When changes are made by those working on the weekend, the updates are not included on Monday morning and are being missed. It would be helpful if you could add more options, like send on "specific day of the week" and "specific time"

Thank you

Matthew Moran

I am asking for the same feature. What about another user security level of "Assigned Rows Only" access. Then you can use existing alerts and create users who are of the "Row only" access variety.

Of course, it would nice to have them segmented on the list of users as it could be unweildy.

I don't think the spam concern is really valid.. If you see people using smartsheet that way, boot them off the system. I have to imagine that 99.99999% of all people on Smartsheet are professionals using it for a professional project communication.

It's not conducive to becoming a "spam" system.

Nic Mangialardi

Hello,

A great way to allow unshared users to receive alerts, notifications, or reminders is through integrating your SmartSheet with an email application like Gmail or Mailchimp; that way unshared users can receive an alert or email based on the renewal date. One company that allows you to do this is Azuqua, an integration platform for cloud applications. Azuqua has a drag and drop rule builder that let’s you track renewal dates and use the email in the Smartsheet to trigger an alert. It is an easy to use platform where you select the applications and functions that you want to use and we take care of the rest. You can test it out with a 14-day free trial and learn more at http://www.azuqua.com/.

saltyblueocean

Has anyone from smartsheet come up with a solution for this?

I understand the concerns for "spamming" people but I need this to send alerts to a fluid and changing list of people. My company uses outlook and we have created a distribution list so that I would only need to send a notification to one email and it would notify all the people I need to notify in one shot.

We use smartsheet to send out alerts that product has been affected and needs to be held so these notifications are essential. Many of the people that would receive these alerts are people far higher up in the food chain that don't have time to sign up to smartsheet to access the information they need.

Shaine Greenwood

Hello,

We currently don't have a way to configure alerts (Reminders or Notifications) to be sent to people that don't have active Smartsheet accounts (logged in to Smartsheet at least once) and aren't shared to the sheet but I've got your vote down for this on our enhancement request list for further consideration by our Product team.

With that being said, you can send rows as email attachments from Smartsheet to people without Smartsheet accounts: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/504773-sending-sheets-rows-via-email

If you need someone to action on something, but they don't have a Smartsheet account, you can send them an update request: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/504779-using-update-requests

The above are both manual processes.

If you're looking for a more automated system, you might consider trying Zapier, Azuqua, or MS Flow.

Matthew Harrison

Please add my vote.

I would like Smart Sheet to send an update alert to the customer when their delivery date gets updated.

The new conditional alerts nearly allows this - if only alerts could be sent to non-shared users.

Marc Hauge

Ugghh. So close Smartsheet. This is a huge deal. We have 2000 employees and can't share them all, now we cant automate status change notifications back to the requester. I love smartsheet, but this really stinks. Why not just have notifications to non shared users not have any links, just read only. Seems so simple it would eliminate the security issue. Now I have two initiatives dead on arrival.

Shaine Greenwood

I can understand your frustration on this feature not being available in Smartsheet. The crux of this isn't whether this is read-only or has links removed for the recipient. If we allow reminders and notifications to be sent to email addresses that we haven't verified (by having them make a Smartsheet account and be shared on the sheet), then it's possible for people to use Smartsheet as an email spamming/blasting service—we don't want that.

I'm not saying that we'll never consider this feature, what I am saying is that we have to be mindful of how much leeway we provide when sending emails to email addresses that aren't vetted in some way.

You might check out a third party integration, such as zapier, that might be able to automate this for you: https://zapier.com/

Andrea Pedersen

Not being able to send notifications to non-shared users may actually keep us from purchasing Smartsheet. What is the point if we have to share every single sheet with every single team member or continue with a manual process? May as well stick with our current programs.....Something Smartsheet should probably think about.

Jamie Bachman

In any form, the external customer is able to enter their email address to receive a copy of their response (when enabled). If they can receive that email, without being shared on the sheet nor concerns of spam, can the sheet use that same email for notifications, alerts or reminders?

Marcin P

I am testing the functionality of auto-update and reminders and just found that it's impossible to send it to non-shared users.

What a pity. I would like to work with a lot of people in my organization, like maybe about 100 people, but I don't want them to see my sheets at all. Just keep them notified when rule is set up.

Please let me know if it's planned to allow such functionality, as I am not 100% sure if I can go for paid plan ('businness' in my case) if not.