Transferring ownership of Workspace easily?

Carolyn Stone

Is there a way to transfer ownership of a workspace without having to remove the current owner from the workspace?  They still need to own specific sheets, and edit others in the workspace, but do not need to own and administer the workspace anymore.

Marc Langeskov

This is a great question.  If there is a solution I'd be interested to hear it as well.  If there isn't then may be it could be added as a feature in a future release?

J. Craig Williams

I'm not sure what the change in ownership may bring to you.

 

Anything the Owner can do, an Admin can do for Sheets or Reports

 

http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/1155182

 

If everyone is one big happy family, an Owner and an Admin is effectively the same.

 

In my situation, it is slightly different, as a consultant I may build a solution in my account and then share that with the customer. When ready, the sheets, reports, and workspaces are turned over the customer - the primary reason is "who pays for it" as the sheet count goes against the Owner. But in general, this is not a big problem.

 

Is there an issue that being an Owner vs just another user brings that I may be unaware? What administrative burden is the user bearing?

 

Just trying to understand.

Craig

 

 

Carolyn Stone

We are trying to reorganize the workspaces we have already and combine/rename and also delete some of the older uneeded ones.  I cannot rename or delete a workspace as an Admin.  I have to be the owner.

 

Kennedy Stomps

Hi Carolyn-- There is not a direct way to do this (like clicking a button), but steps to change the owner of a Workspace can be found here. Have the sheet owner drag the sheets they own out of the Workspace temporarily (I suggest using a folder to keep them organized), then follow the steps outlined in the article.

 

If you want the former owner to still have access to the Workspace, you'll just want to re-share it with them after you remove them during the transfer process.

Carolyn Stone

Thanks for responding.  I am aware of how to do it that way, I just was looking for another easier way to do it that did not involve having my VP spend time dragging 200+ sheets out and in of various workspaces, and removing and adding them back in.  In our case a person left who had been the owner of a bunch of workspaces and sheets, so they transferred everything thieir supervisor (the VP) when they left to reassign as needed.  The VP is trying to delegate this task for obvious reasons.

 

I would ask that you put this request in your product backlog for the future. I am sure I am not the only one who will need it going forward. Thanks! 

kbrandhagen

For myself, this is because I can only own 50 sheets. I need to transfer ownership of a particular workspace that I no longer run so I can continue to create and help other departments manage their projects and best utilize workspaces. 

Chris McKay

Hi Craig,

One big disadvantage with Owner vs Admin relates to additional users requesting access to a workspace/sheet.

If I create the sheet (as a consultant, developer etc.) or provision a group of templates (via Smartsheet Control Center), I would want to transfer the ownership to the business owner pretty quickly, as anybody requesting access to the workspace/sheets will result in the request email being sent to me.

It make sense that the business owner should make the decision about whether the requester should have access.

Cheers,

Chris

SarahW

+1! We are transferring ownership of Workspaces for teams of 200+ people with many sheets, and it is getting messy having to nag people to temporarily drag sheets or temporarily switch the owners of the individual sheets just so we can change the owner of the Workspace.

It would be great to be able to switch the owner of the Workspace without needing to change ownership of all the individual sheets. When people leave our company or move to different parts of the company it is tricky to update ownership.  It also requires us to explain the complicated process to each individual each time.

Rick Carlisle

The lack of ability to directly transfer workspace ownership is becoming prohibitive to the growth of Smartsheet within our company.  Please get this capability into your product development plan!  If this capability isn't developed, we may be looking into other solution platforms.

Thank you,

 

Angie Hatfield

I have a workspace where the owner is no longer at our company and is no longer a user. The only user is me who is Editor-can share. I am our SS Admin and I have not found a way to transfer ownership to me so I can just delete the empty workspace.

The owner got married, changed names and somehow this workspace did not follow with the name change. When she left, all ownership was transferred to me but this one did not.

Any idea on this? I just want to delete it. I did put in a low priority support email.

ddutta

Thanx for the links and the details.

The use case for Transfer Ownership is when 2 companies are working in a project. The Owner of the work space is someone from the Consulting firm. At the end of the Project the Consulting firm wants to hand over the works pace ownership to the Customer as part of Project Closure activities. 

Hope you can sugest a solution.