Bulk Sharing

David Dolch

I had a user with the following situation.

They had started to share their project sheet, with maybe 20 people

Then somebody gave them an excel file of 50 people, all who needed to be shared. However 10 or so of the 50 were also part of the 20 who were already shared.

When the user tried to copy and paste the excel emails into the Smartsheet share, Smartsheet came back with the (in my opinion poorly worded) "One or more users or groups already have access at an equal or higher permission level" error message

The user had to manually scan the list and remove the 10 people that were throwing the error.

Is there a way around this? Can this error check be turned off? Why does Smartsheet even prevent you from "resharing" in the first place. People actually re-share Google drive items all of the time, when people "loose the link". It's a common practice. They try to do it in Smartsheet as well, and the get this error, which they do not quite understand, because it is something they frequently do in other cloud based applications.

Thanks

Jaykel Torres

Hey @David Dolch,

I can confirm that it is expected behavior to receive this message when attempting to Share a Smartsheet Item to a User who already appears within the Sharing List. We don't currently have the ability to override this, but you may submit an Enhancement Request via this form for our Product Team to consider for development. We appreciate your input!

As a possible solution, the User can utilize Contact Groups opposed to Sharing Users directly to the item. By utilizing this feature, they can manage the singular Group and Share it to the item. Even if there are individuals Shared to the item separately and Shared to it via Contact Group, this will not cause any errors to occur.

We typically communicate about new or improved features once they've been released. Depending on the nature of the changes, we announce through email, in-product messaging, or via announcements here on the Smartsheet Community.

I hope this helps!

Jaykel

David Dolch

Contact Groups have the same limitations - no way to bulk share, upgrade, downgrade, or delete from a CSV or other list of emails. As well as many of my users do not have a license.

This may not be a limitation with some smaller projects, but we have 140,000 employees. Some of our project teams range well into the triple digits.

The inability to easily update sharing permissions causes project managers to spend a lot of time doing stare, compare, and click.