Sharing - Permissions by Subfolder or Workgroup

All,

I want to create a structure (I don't care if it is a folder or a workspace) for a project with 3 sheets and 2 subfolders. Each subfolder contains 2 additional sheets. I want to share the project structure with my customer, but I don't want to share the subfolders (one folder has financial information and the other has helper reports for the dashboard).

Problems with a Workspace

If I create the project as a workspace and grant my customers access to the workspace, they get access to everything including subfolders.

If I grant access to specific sheets in the workspace that keeps my subfolders internal, but the sheets are shared as individual sheets to my customers. As a result, my customers lose the readability of having the sheets grouped into folders by project (all the shared sheets of multiple projects come into a single directory for the user)

Problems with a Folder

If I create the project in the folder space (again 3 sheets and 2 subfolders), I can ONLY share at the sheet level. So again I can keep the subfolders internal, but as before my customer loses the readability of having the sheets grouped by project.

I am kind of new to Smartsheet. Am I missing something or is there a workaround?

Thanks

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Sharing and Collaboration

Permission Problem

Accepted answers

mattstoc

Andree,

Thank you for the reply. That is the solution I came up with as well. The primary drawback is I put data that should reside in a single place (all the project data) in two separate places depending on who is using it. It is just not as logically clean.

Have a great day.

All comments

Andrée Starå

Hi @mattstoc

I hope you're well and safe!

I'd recommend using two Workspaces. One internal and one external.

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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mattstoc

Andree,

Have a great day.

Ashley F

@Andrée Starå is there any way to do this without creating multiple workspaces? Like @mattstoc mentioned, I would really rather keep all the sheets for one project together.

Flextur Mike

I second this as well, we have the same issues.

dizzy_brain

Im new to SS. Let me get this straight, in case I am mistaken: if you have a Workspace with multiple Folders (e.g. I have one for each Project) you can EITHER give entire Team access to entire Workspace, or assign permission to relevant people for each SHEET, but not for each Folder. In other words, if I wanted only some of the Team to see some Projects, I cant currently do this at Folder-Level but laboriously need to give each individual access to each individual relevant sheet. The other drawback being that they will not see a nice structure of Project Folder with its subfolders and sheets, but will just see whichever sheets are assigned to them on one big flat mess? I strongly support the calls for Folder-level permissions within the Workspace please. It is not practical to keep different elements of one Project inside separate Workspaces (as some have suggested).

Patrick H

Using smartsheet to keep track of employee time spent on projects. My workspace is populated with sub folders, It would be very nice to just share the subfolders with the individual employees and not the whole workspace.

I wonder if this something the smartsheet dev team would consider changing in the future.

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