Transferring Ownership of Items after a License has been Revoked

Paul Grim

I revoked a user's license so that I could grant it to another user (the original owner was not using the license). This was my first time revoking a license, and I did not elect to transfer the user's items to another user because the user had not logged into Smartsheet for almost 4 months so I assumed their items were abandoned.

However, now I realize that the previously licensed user had created some items for other users to utilize, even though they themselves were no longer involved in using those items.

How can I transfer ownership of those items to myself until I can determine who the new owner needs to be? I've already opened a support ticket for this but I thought I'd also ask here in case there's a way to do it myself (although I couldn't find a way to do it in the Admin Center).

Genevieve P.

Hi Paul,

Unlicensed accounts are unable to own any sheets; this means that after the license was revoked, all the owned sheets of that account became read-only for 30 days since the account is now a Free account (see here for more details on switching to Free).

You would need to add this account back into your organization with a license again, make sure they have recovered any owned sheets if they have been deleted, and then use the Transfer Sheets action from the User Management window.

If giving them a license not possible, then I would suggest that any of the shared sheets that this user created which your other members need could be duplicated. Then the new, copied versions can be used as the main files. You can duplicate a sheet by Saving as New (see here).

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Paul Grim

Thanks Genevieve. I assigned a license back to the same user, and I am working with her to have her request that she become the Owner of those sheets again (ownership was transferred to me when the license was revoked, and Smartsheet won't let me transfer Ownership back to her; apparently the only way to do that is for her to initiate a request that I transfer ownership back to her). I will let you know if we have any trouble!

Genevieve P.

Hi Paul,

A faster way to do this would be to put all the sheets in a folder, then move the folder into a workspace where the other user has at least Admin permissions.

Then the user can just drag the entire folder out of the workspace into their own Sheets folder and this will give them ownership. The Help Center article on transferring has a step-by-step of how to do this, at the very bottom (see here).

Paul Grim

Ah -- good idea! I'll have to try that.

Thanks Genevieve - you rock! 🤩

Genevieve P.

Haha no problem at all!!