Need Update Request sent to 2 different people to stop after one of them responds

Question

Scenario:

I've built an Update Request that says: when rows are added AND limit increase amt is $10K-$50K, send an Update Request to Contacts in a cell for the Column "Managers".

The "Managers" column has me as a contact (using personal email address) and me as a contact (using work email address) [for testing purposes]

The thing being requested in the update is to enter your email address in the 'Claimed By' column.

DESIRED result: the first person to respond to the update request will enter their email address in the 'Claimed By' column and the 2nd person to try to open the update request and respond, gets the message that the link has already been used and it stops them from proceeding. (then another workflow is triggered to send an approval request to the contact in the 'Claimed By' column.

ACTUAL Result: 1st manager (my personal email test) gets the update request and enters their email address and submits. Then I go to my work email address as the 2nd Manager and it LETS me override the first entry.

Ggggrrrr.

Back story: my original design to the process was to use an alert automation that emailed both of the potential 'approvers' and if they had capacity at that moment to do the approval, they would jump in to Smartsheet and tag the row. But no no no, we can't dare ask managers to have to do the 'extra' step by logging in. So, the above scenario is my work around because it allows them to use their emails to keep the process going but, it's not working. Am I doing something wrong or is the functionality just not there? Would the workflow behave differently if I used a group email address for the 2 managers? Is there another workaround that I'm not thinking of? I don't think I can use the plain ole Approval Request because then they might duplicate efforts...thanks so much in advance :) -Shelley

Jeff Reisman · Accepted Answer

The only way I know of to do this is to send the update request to one person, and then forward the same update request email to the next (or others,) so that the Update request link is the same on all the emails. Once an Update request link is opened, filled in, and submitted, then the link becomes inactive. (It can be opened over and over for like 30 days if not submitted, but goes inactive as soon as data is submitted via the link.)

I'm not sure how you'd achieve this though, unless you have them all come to you and build Email forwarding rules in your inbox. You could customize the email subject or message body to include the names in the manager column, and use that as the basis for the forwarding rules to send the messages automatically from your email to the correct people.