To The Smartsheet Product Team: The Smartsheet protocol to allow unlicensed users limited access to the Smartsheet system has been an extremely valuable element of your product. This practice had a very impactful part of my decision to pitch your system to our organization. Thank you for offering this open access capability.
Regarding the announcement today to restrict certain capabilities to licensed users only, I respect your decision to tighten the reins a bit on your system and I support this decision. There is, however, one extent of your restrictions that I would ask you to reconsider, which is disallowing unlicensed users access to cell history. This feature has been very helpful in tracking past actions taken on tasks, and I have been successful in training my staff to be self-sufficient in using this feature without needing to come to me to resolve issues. Taking that away from our non-licensed users would be taking steps backwards in our success with the Smartsheet system.
The cell history feature does not seem to be associated with developing, creating, or manipulating sheets. Just as non-licensed users can read or edit data in a given cell, without making changes or modifications to the structure of the sheet, viewing the cell history is purely just the ability to read a collection of past edits for a cell without the ability to change the structure of the sheet.
I support your action to initiate the other restrictions noted in your message. I hope you will give more consideration to the value of non-licensed users being able to access the View Cell History feature.
Thank you,
