Has anyone had to merge two control center instances after a company merger?

Jenna Vanderzee

My company merged with another, and we each had control center implementations prior to merging. When we consolidated accounts at the enterprise level, the Smartsheet account team was able to merge our general smartsheet environments but our Control Centers remain separate. Apparently there is no way to easily merge our Control Centers, one has to be rebuilt into the other environment. Wondering if anyone else has had to go through this process and how difficult was it to get onto one instance? What were some of the key challenges you ran into?

jwalker

@Jenna Vanderzee - Did you ever receive a response on this original post? Can you also expand on what you mean by 'environments'. in the following: "When we consolidated accounts at the enterprise level, the Smartsheet account team was able to merge our general smartsheet environments (are you referencing workspaces?) "

Also - How did you manage the different accesses to workspaces/sheets or is this part of the merging of enterprise accounts?

Jenna Vanderzee

@jwalker no responses yet

jwalker

@Anne-Solene Monrouzeau

Jenna Vanderzee

@jwalker - by "environment" - before our merger we were two different companies, so our data lived in two different instances of smartsheet core. They were able to merge us all into one (so all of our sheets, workspaces, etc live in the same "company" now). Smartsheet had an automated way of doing this so we didn't even have an outage. Once we were on the same company, we still just grant permissions at a workspace level to collaborators within our account.

For Control center we still have two different "company spaces." There is no automated merge or easy copy paste, we are told it requires rebuilding blueprints from one company into the other company's control center.

jwalker

@Jenna Vanderzee - Thank you for the above information. Very helpful. Wanted to follow up to see if there's been any update/progress to your initial post? cc @Anne-Solene Monrouzeau

• Did you end up manually rebuilding the blueprints from scratch?
• How long did it take to merge the 2 different environments into one Smartsheet core?
• Are there any lessons learned that you may be able to share for us to prepare? Thank you @Anne-Solene Monrouzeau

Jenna Vanderzee

@jwalker - merging 2 different environments into one Smartsheet core was a couple week process for us, which was mostly planning and communications activity. The actual merge happened in the matter of a few hours, once all the planning was complete. I imagine this depends on the admin setup of the two environments, for us we didn't have any SSO set up so things like that could add to the timeline.

Haven't done the control center merge yet, but I'm now being told the manual rebuild can be done in a matter of days (for 2 blueprints, assuming no changes to the templates just a copy/paste and rebuild on new control center program). Again this would depend on scale of how many blueprints. Will share any lessons learned after we get through it.

Brooke Y

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/358948#Comment_358948

Hi Jenna

Just wondering if you went through this process yet. If your new environments were merged the blueprints should have copied over. The rebuild would be a process of setting up the new CC in one browser window, while viewing the existing in another window to duplicate. Is this the process you are going for?

SherriK

@Jenna Vanderzee-Is the 'Smartsheet had an automated way of doing this' the same 'Admin Center: Combine accounts with User Merge-Admin Center: Combine accounts with User Merge | Smartsheet Learning Center?

We are in the process of needing to merge two different instances of Smartsheets due to an acquisition so looking for some advice from others that have successfully completed this.

Jenna Vanderzee

@SherriK - no, the combine user accounts with user merge was not the automated thing I was referring to. The merge itself was handled completely by the Smartsheet technical team, not any actions in the Admin center for us. Worth noting: our two companies did not have UAP or SSO set up, so if you do that might complicate things and I can see where merging accounts may become needed. The Smartsheet team guided us through all the necessary steps.

Jenna Vanderzee

Hi @Brooke Y - yes, now it looks like if we want to combine our blueprints into a new control center that is the process we would follow. I have also learned that larger enterprises can have a bunch of separate control center programs and they do not necessarily need to be combined into one. The limitation we were trying to solve for was that Resource Management module can only be connected to one Control Center program at a time. But apparently if we have multiple RM's and multiple CC's, that is ok as long as the relationship is always 1:1. I'm not sure yet if we will still try to consolidate, or if we will actually end up keeping them separated.

Brooke Y

@SherriK, we recently acquired another company and merged our Smartsheet instances. Since one of our orgs was an Enterprise level Smartsheet account, we were able to absorb the other quite easily. It didn't require using the merge function and no sheets were lost. You'll need to determine which account will be the new account and if you have SSO on the one being absorbed, you will need to add the domains before merging. Your account rep can help you determine which account you should use as the main one if you need. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have too.