Smartsheet Partner Thoughts - Enhancement Requests Updates Wanted

Nick Burrus

Hello Smartsheet team, my name is Nick. I am a certified partner of Smartsheet. I've tried asking these questions before but we're ignored a lot on the community forums, etc and told to simply file an "enhancement request". Smartsheet is an amazing software with a lot of functionality that is quickly already falling out of favor in the industry of which I work because it cannot keep up with competitor's features. The features. Trying to bid smartsheet as a solution is becoming hard when your competitors offer features that should've been natively implemented and Smartsheet doesn't yet. These feature requests going back 5+ years.

Smartsheet prides itself on being transparent and marketing for transparency, but the software development side is rather far from transparent for feature requests. Nobody ever really hears back. If something can't be done, tell us. If you wrote yourselves in a corner and something will forever be impossible on Smartsheet, tell us so we stop wasting time on trying to make something work that we want.

There are outside solutions and companies making a fortune off of this, which is now a native feature in every single Smartsheet competitor. Community members if you agree with any please feel free to respond with your own input.

• Dropdowns populated from another Smartsheet needs to be supported natively. There have been well over 500+ posts on the community forum going back several years now. There have been well over 50 at last count people who've sworn to put in an Enhancement request. Not one has ever reported back they heard back from Smartsheet.
• Smart Cascading Dropdowns - These are industry standard at nearly every fortune 500 and in government work, and you will see it live in any government form, etc. Cascading dropdowns are important. The "conditional logic workarounds" that are being suggested are not nearly enough, because these require a plethora of additional hidden columns and it'd get progressively worse as the larger the datasets become.
• Smarter Conditional Logic for forms. The modern form software has next sections etc selections for smart groups of data collection, even including smart responses. If today's date isn't selected, it'd be nice to go Pssst you selected a date in the future was that right? The pre-population features are severely lacking. You can't pre-populate a lot of things.
• There's no way to just pre-populate a list of emails, without making them contacts to do update requests, etc. If the person has punctuation in the email it doesn't work. Smartsheet support denies this is an issue, and did so on me with a live video call.
• Gantt Sprint percentages haven't worked correctly since the introduction of Gantt. I tried reporting this on Smartsheet through support channels and was always told it's working as intended, or they don't see the problem. I did live video support and showed them. The solution is to basically delete everything and reset it up. That's not a solution. This is a bug that you guys are denying.
• Force Time (like start time / end time) to be a proper format in Form/Data inputs.
• While we're on it, is there a way to force the form date input to be by default "today" automatically? This has beenr equested a lot. This is a standard in even 20 year old form technology.

As a Smartsheet partner, I love Smartsheet, but it is notoriously frustrating to work with your team. You guys have amazing potential. I can link you to every 500+ community posts here if you'd like about the above issues and features.

It'd be really nice if Enhancement requests at least got some sort of official response.

Other Community members. Is there a feature you need to make Smartsheet an easier sale for your company? Respond here with your thoughts.

Roxann L.

I am glad someone who understand Smartsheet more than me said this. I am a new user and am trying to set up so many things I consider "basic" but just can't seem to get any of them to work. So then I try to find workaround only to get stuck and have to fine a workaround to my workaround. It is extremely frustrating. What is the best platform you would recommend that can perform these actions? Everything you listed is exactly the things I need and just can't get to function.

Nick Burrus

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/278869#Comment_278869

I agree. Smartsheet is an amazing flexible piece of software. But, Excel just added nearly every single piece on Smartsheet's past Roadmap plus more. There's so many competitors. It's getting harder and harder to justify Smartsheet to our clients. I've never once heard back about any enhancement requests as well.

For Forms, for right now I would suggest use Google Forms and push the data to Smartsheet. It actually works extraordinarily well, and the Smartsheet team did a great job on this connection.

Rsteer

This isn't central to your point, but there does seem to be a trend of more and more companies (including Smartsheet) relying on integrations with other platforms that can be "specialists" for key functions, whether it's Google Forms or logic connectors like IFTTT and Zapier. (I've seen a couple of discussions of Smartsheet problems that people solved with Zapier because SS couldn't do it itself.) Unfortunately for US government users, most of those other tools are not FedRAMPed (certified to meet Federal cloud cybersecurity standards) and thus can't be used if we want to tell people our Smartsheet apps are FedRAMPed even though Smartsheet itself is. (The same applies to other platforms that also rely on third-party integrations rather than being self-contained.)