Improvements to Smartsheet Sights™, Reports, and User Management

Shaine Greenwood

We’ve just rolled out a new release that includes improvements to Smartsheet Sights, Reports, and User Management.

Note that the referenced Help Center articles below will be updated with information on the new features tomorrow, Sunday (11/13)

Let’s take a look at these new features!

Sights:

• A new Title Widget allows you to name your Sights. More information will be available in our Widget Types for Sights article in the Help Center.
• Print your Sights for offline use. Check out our Printing from Smartsheet article for details.
• Eliminate the appearance of widget borders by applying a white background to your Sights. Steps on this process can be found in Creating a Smartsheet Sight.
  
  
  
  (The Sights feature is included with Business, and Enterprise plans. For more information about plans and pricing, including which features are included with which plans, please see our Pricing page.)

User Management —bulk user updates allows SysAdmins on Team, Business, and Enterprise plans to edit user types for multiple users more easily. Find out more in the Managing Users article in the Help Center.

Reporting —the Who? section of the Report Builder now features a Current user criteria that allows a more customized view of tasks assigned to different users on a single report. You now only need to create a single report for your collaborators to view tasks assigned to them. Learn more about this in the Help Center article on Creating Reports. An overview of new features, plus a list of bugs fixed in this release, will be publicly available later this week on our Release Notes site:https://www.smartsheet.com/release-notes You can try out these new features in Smartsheet today!

LouSnz

Hello, since this new release we have discovered that email update requests are not sending from smartsheet?  Also when you 'send row' the email is not being sent...!!!

 

Smartsheet is this something you are aware of?

Brad Jones

@LouSnz:

 

I tested this feature, and it still is working.  It took several minutes for the emails to be sent but indeed they are being sent.  I tried by sending an UR to myself, and one to a different email account.  I then did a send row to myself, and one to another account.  This is working for me right now.

 

@everyone else

 

When did they release the "Business" level of account?  I never saw the release for this.  But now there are four account levels instead of three.  Hmpf.

Gwyneth C

@LouSnz

Please contact support if you continue to experience issues with email. There are no known issues with that service at this time.

J. Craig Williams

@Brad - I didn't see the notification on Business either - looks like it incorporates Sights at a much better rate than before.

Best part of the release for me is the Report by user.

The rest doesn't solve any of my problems. But the Report ... satisfied.

 

Craig

Gordon

How does the new "current user" feature setting work for reports that are setup to send as an attachment on a recurring basis?   If I create a new report with a filter to show the current user's assigned to tasks (which shows mine since I'm logged in), then share that report as an attachment via email to send on a recurring basis in the future to my collaborators, will the collaborators receive a PDF attachment with my tasks, or theirs?  The collaborators are all users on my Team account.  Also, if I share a Published URL in view only mode, what will the recipient see when they click the link?

 

Great feature addition though!

J. Craig Williams

Gordon,

 

I did not test this, but Reports sent have also been WYSIWYG, or nearly so.

I can imagine the system would be smart (no pun intended) enough to figure out who you were sending it to, try to login or otherwise determine what that email address could or could not see, recreate the PDF and then resend it.

Same with the Publish functionality - there is too many barriers (and rightly so) to have the system do otherwise.

 

Or at least, that would be my educated guess.

 

Craig

 

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Gordon! J. is right on the money; for the Current user criteria to work, the user must be logged in to Smartsheet and viewing the report in order to see their tasks. Since sending the report as a read only email attachment will display your tasks (or the tasks from the user that sent the send as attachment email).

 

I'll get your vote down for an "emailed user" type of feature such that will generate PDFs for email based on a user's assigned tasks.

Brad Jones

@Craig

Glad they fixed something for you.  It didn't do anything for me on this round of changes, but my hope is that it is a stepping stone to the things I do need.  We need reports by user, but we need the mgrs to be able to run these reports by user for each day and for each workspace, and it must include all the changes by user (including comments and attachments - which are not always spotted by the current reports)

As for the Business level Plan, i may be able to convince my boss to add it - now that it's at such an attractive price.  Sights seem quite nice, and could help the users with their work management.

J. Craig Williams

So we have a new feature request:

 

Run report as other user.

This needs to be VERY controlled as the security implications are huge.

The whole point of sharing permissions is to lock things down.

A run-as-other-user should still only show me what we BOTH can see, not just what the other user sees.

 

I would bet against the "emailed user" type of feature. The attachments can be sent to hundreds of people or just one. Each one could see a different report that had to be generated just for them. 

If you want this functionality, have the worker set up their own send-as-attachment and send it to the manager (and themselves and the sys admin if you want)

 

Craig

 

Gordon

I'm a bit confused, but the functionality I'm looking for is the ability to have a URL or email attachment be sent with a collaborator's assigned tasks from multiple sheets within a defined workspace.  The collaborators are not shared to all of the sheets.

 

Up until now, our workaround was to create an individual report for each collaborator, then share the published URL & email attachment with that specific collaborator.  If I can achieve the same functionality with a single report, that would be a net positive for me.

 

I don't know how the Smartsheet backend works, but logically, it's got to be better to have one report achieve the same function vs. 20+ reports & email attachments.

Jennifer Greenough

Hello,

Glad you added the option to print Sights.  I'm noticing that the Sight only prints what is visible on the screen and there is no option to click such that it prints everything contained in those boxes.  I have timeline information in my Sights and the on line version fits on a screen then allows the user to scroll.  Is there any way to have an option when printing to choose to print what is visible on the screen or to print everything?  That would be helpful since it is challenging to update the view of the Sight every time the content gets long enough that it doesn't fit into the boxes.

Thanks,

Jennifer

Daniel Stein

Thanks Jennifer for your question. If you want to print the entire Gantt chart, I would recommend opening up the report and printing it separately. As you noticed, Sight Print preserves the layout of the Sight and prints exactly what you can see on the screen, not including content that is scrolled out of the widget.

 

We'll also log your request to have a way to see scrolled content in the printed Sight, for consideration in a future release.

 

Best regards,

Daniel

Gwyneth C

@Brad and Craig...

 

Good call about the Business plan. I just posted a bit more about it in an annoucnement. Sorry for the oversight.

 

https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/new-business-plan-available

 

Brad Jones

Hey Shaine and Gwyneth,

 

Your product roadmap page still needs some updating.  It does not have a link/note for the November release.  Also SalesforceV2 was released a while back, right? (but it's still in the roadmap).  Just would be good to get those things up to date.  

Also, someone somewhere had mentioned adding target quarters to the roadmap.  I know you are loathe to put in dates on your developments, but it sure would be nice for us users to see something in there.  Heck, even if you pad it with another quarter for safety's sake it'd still be nice to have a better idea of what's at the top of the list and what do we need to wait for.

Gwyneth C

Hi Brad,

We’re making some changes to the way that we communicate about upcoming features. I’ll reach out privately with more details.

Cheers,

Gwyneth