Best practices for Smartsheet clean up/declutter

caolan.reilly

Hi,

Our company has a lot of Smartsheet's and currently a lot of inactive ones (1500+). I've been tasked with finding a way to declutter/ archive off a lot of these inactive sheets. I'm wondering what the best practice for this would be as I'm new to Smartsheet and as far as I'm aware Smartsheet doesn't have an archiving function as we do not have the Control Centre feature. Some of the sheets are assigned to Workspaces but the vast majority have no assigned workspace or 'blank' workspace which makes it very messy and hard for users to find the sheets they are looking for as it's so cluttered. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Ian Cooper

I would take a stepped approach.

Step 1. Delete anything that is not being utilized.

You could go into the Admin Center, under Governance Controls, and set up a Data Retention Policy. I have it set up to send the owner of the sheet a notification 3 days prior to deletion.

If it hasn't had activity in more than a year, I'm going to say it is probably safe to delete.

Step 2. Change the parameters of the above policy to Last Modified - More than 60 days ago

Let it send out the notification of the sheets impacted to the various users. It will look similar to the below image. Have your users send the lists to you with comments on if they would like to keep, archive or delete the sheet.

***Warning, make sure you deactivate the Data Retention Policy after it sends out the notification***

Paul Newcome

You could create a new workspace titled "Archive" and move sheets to there.

caolan.reilly

Will users still have access to the sheets even if it's moved into a different workspace?

Ian Cooper

I would take a stepped approach.

Step 1. Delete anything that is not being utilized.

You could go into the Admin Center, under Governance Controls, and set up a Data Retention Policy. I have it set up to send the owner of the sheet a notification 3 days prior to deletion.

If it hasn't had activity in more than a year, I'm going to say it is probably safe to delete.

Step 2. Change the parameters of the above policy to Last Modified - More than 60 days ago

Let it send out the notification of the sheets impacted to the various users. It will look similar to the below image. Have your users send the lists to you with comments on if they would like to keep, archive or delete the sheet.

***Warning, make sure you deactivate the Data Retention Policy after it sends out the notification***