Connected User Count and Published Items

Sing C

Hi,

Hoping the brain trust here has experience of this. We are on Smartsheet Advance and on a certain tier of Connected User and I'm curious if viewing a Smartsheet object on an external web page via its embedded publish link increment the Connected User count?

For example, take the publish link for a dashboard and embed it into a SharePoint page, then visitors to the SharePoint site, over time, view the page where the dashboard is embedded.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Kleerfyre

@Sing C yeah, I'm not surprised by the generic answer. Did you get access to your admin console or get in touch with someone that has access to view the connected users insight report? I bet that will answer your question.

Kleerfyre

Do you have access to your admin console? If so, you can see your connected users count and how close you are to your limit. You could also do a test to see if accessing the embedded link affects your counts. The way my plan is set up, users have to be authenticated to our domain to count as a connected user. A published link wouldn't affect that count if they are not logging into Smartsheet to see the dashboard via the link from what I can tell on my plan, but yours maybe different. I would start with either looking in the admin console or getting with your admin and looking at this from there.

Sing C

Appreciate the insight @Kleerfyre!

Got a response from our Account Manager. It sounds more generic than plan-specific, so may be helpful to others.

"...connected users are all users that have authenticated and interacted with a Smartsheet object (licensed or collaborators). An authenticated user is a user that has logged into their Smartsheet account at least once. Both licensed and unlicensed users can sign into Smartsheet. 

An unauthenticated user is an unknown user that has never signed into Smartsheet before or viewers of a published Smartsheet object (viewing a public link) or users accessing a form that does not include collecting user information (does not require user login). Those users, if they have not authenticated into some other Smartsheet object, would not be counted in your connected user count."

Kleerfyre

@Sing C yeah, I'm not surprised by the generic answer. Did you get access to your admin console or get in touch with someone that has access to view the connected users insight report? I bet that will answer your question.

Sing C

@Kleerfyre Thanks - a bit of a mis-speak on my part. My reference to the answer being generic wasn't to suggest it wasn't what I was looking for or a throwaway comment; but that the definition of "Connected Users" is generic and not specific to an organization's Smartsheet plan.

I don't have access to the Admin console, our IT department owns that. I've been sent the Connected User report though and it appears to confirm my initial thought and our Account Manager's response - that published links embedded into external pages don't increment Connected User counts, which makes sense intuitively; if visiting a an intranet page where I don't have to authenticate (from a Smartsheet perspective) leads to an uptick in user count, then a refresh of that page would do the same because Smartsheet would have no way of knowing if it was one user versus another visiting that page to capture the "user" info.

Appreciate the input!

Kleerfyre

Glad I could help!