Best Practice for Organizing Workspaces/Folders Without Premium Add Ons

Sandra Guzman

Hello SS Community!

I am a new admin currently responsible for managing our portfolio of work. I am loving SS and have been busy developing templates that my team will soon be using. The reason I am submitting this today is to find out what the best way is to organize 500 active projects without the use of SS Premium Add Ons. In the future it's a possibility that I can explore (10kft or Control Center), but at this time I will have to make use of current functionality for creating workspaces and/or folders.

We have hundreds of projects that are currently in progress. As an admin I need to consider the visibility that my leadership will have to these projects as well.

At this time I have a couple of workspaces that have been created that houses our intake form, a source document and project dashboard. I was thinking that I could create a project plan workspace and add multiple folders that cover a range of letters to make searching for projects easier. So this is what I am thinking:

Project Plan Workspace

Folder A - E

Folder F- J

Folder K - O

Folder P - T

Folder U - Z

I need for data from my source document to autopopulate information in the project plan templates. I also need information from each project plan to autopopulate some information on my source document. I will have individual reports for each project plan that staff can use to monitor their projects. The source document will feed into the main project dashboard.

Ultimately I need to understand the best way to proceed in order to ensure that this is scalable and easy to manage. I am in the early phases and have just shared out my source document to the team. I have searched the site and didn't find much guidance so any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

SS Admin SG

Mike Wilday

Hi Sandra, Smartsheet has a pretty nice search functionality that will allow you find any project with ease, so organize the sheets however is easiest for your mind.

To manage clutter, we have an Active Projects and a Completed Projects folder. Because, inevitably, that list will grow, at some point your alphabetized sorting folders may be as long as your current project list as is. Consider weekly managing projects and moving them from active to completed.

A note of warning

Do be aware that without control center you will want to spend AMPLE time thinking through all of your notification rules, automation procedures, and the likes BEFORE you create all those project sheets - replicating automations from project to project is INCREDIBLY tedious at this point and its better to have that baked into your template and . We are managing MULTIPLE projects in our course development strategy using smartsheet and when we determined to add a notification it was a very time-consuming task to add it to each active project.

I hope that information helps you consider what's best for your current situation. Have a good week and stay safe!

Mike Wilday

Hi Sandra, Smartsheet has a pretty nice search functionality that will allow you find any project with ease, so organize the sheets however is easiest for your mind.

To manage clutter, we have an Active Projects and a Completed Projects folder. Because, inevitably, that list will grow, at some point your alphabetized sorting folders may be as long as your current project list as is. Consider weekly managing projects and moving them from active to completed.

A note of warning

Do be aware that without control center you will want to spend AMPLE time thinking through all of your notification rules, automation procedures, and the likes BEFORE you create all those project sheets - replicating automations from project to project is INCREDIBLY tedious at this point and its better to have that baked into your template and . We are managing MULTIPLE projects in our course development strategy using smartsheet and when we determined to add a notification it was a very time-consuming task to add it to each active project.

I hope that information helps you consider what's best for your current situation. Have a good week and stay safe!

Travis Hellstrom

This is very helpful! Thank you @Sandra Guzman and @Mike Wilday !

Mike Wilday

@Travis Hellstrom You're welcome! :)