Give Administrators full vision and access to all sheets

Warren jenkins · 08/17/23

I recently contacted support about this and was amazed to find that what I thought would be a simple function doesn't exist.

We have had staff leave recently and not so recently and have had requests from senior management to look for data that they may have stored in sheets that they may of owned or shared or transferred with someone else prior to leaving. I'm not a big user of Smartsheet, but was amazed to find that there is no way to perform a simple search for all sheets within our organization and be able to access them without them being shared. This is a basic administration function.

I was advised that a Sheet Access Report can be run, but this isn't really the same thing so maybe this can be a feature request?

Thanks,

WJ.

ker9 · 09/07/23

We have an Enterprise Plan and I am an Administrator. We run a sheet access report per user when someone terminates. It can also be run for the entire account. What we cannot see that we absolutely should have access to is any add-on integrations such as WorkAps, DataMesh, Pivot, etc. We can see Dynamic Views through the Transfer icon.

Visibility for add-on integrations is critical.

I disagree that Administrators should have access to sheets - there are confidentiality reasons not to give actual access, but you can still see that it exists and who owns it through the Sheet Access reports. Unfortunately, they just removed the ability to see the Owner in a separate column, making it more difficult to manage.

Warren jenkins · 09/07/23

Systems Administrators have full access to everything so why should Smarsheets be considered differently? Anything contained within an organization's systems and licensed applications etc. are the intellectual property of that organization. Therefore, should the CEO request access to it, they are entitled to see it and therefore an administrator should have the ability to be able to search and provide the access, just the same as anything else stored within the system - it's basic systems administration.

Kelly Ospina · 02/08/24

I strongly support the ask that System Admins have access to all data in the system. I am also a Salesforce Administrator, and this is how it is in that system, and in fact seems to be pretty standard in other systems I'm familiar with. The data doesn't belong to the user, it belongs to the organization, so the data privacy argument doesn't make sense to me.

Samuel Mueller · 02/08/24

Through the API, a System admin can get any information and update shares. I did upvote this though. I also believe that their admin changes that are upcoming will help resolve some of these issues.

Jesse Crandall · 02/21/24

@Samuel Mueller by default do System admins have access to view all sheets through the API or do they have to utilize the "Assume-User" header? https://smartsheet.redoc.ly/#section/API-Basics/HTTP-Headers

Samuel Mueller · 02/21/24

@Jesse Crandall they must use the Assume-User header. Also if a user has left the organization it is best practice to transfer their owned items to a new user, which can be done in User admin. If they transferred it prior to leaving you would have to know who it was transferred to unless their account still has access to it.

Kim Gilmour · 03/26/24

Just adding a comment here because this would be VERY helpful. I would also love the ability to assign individual favorites and views (beyond just Work Apps) aka for non-licensed users. I consider this a natural progression to sys admins being able to access all sheets. However, having access to all sheets would be a huge win for me since I'm also responsible for making sure our executive dashboards actually include all relevant data regardless of rogue Smartsheet users.

I'm a single admin/project manager for a company of about 700 employees and rolling out Smartsheet to all would be MUCH easier if I could create what I want them to see/interact with and ensure they all have easy access to it.

SharonStevensonAEA · 06/11/24

As the System Admin for our company Smartsheet account, and in a coordination role for all projects across the business, I find it crazy that I cannot view all sheets that have been created within our account. Not only do I need to "ask" a sheet owner to add me (and hope they do), it is also too complicated to know how many sheets and types of projects that are currently active. While I understand the need for confidentiality in some cases, I believe this should be a decision for the business, not for the software developer. System Admins should be able to access every sheet whenever they need to, and have the same abilities as the owner of the sheet.

ss428 · 10/16/24

How is this not a feature?
Oh wait, it will be… for a price in a future update.

JE IFI · 11/06/24

Hello- I have a business account with multiple users. We need the account owner/admin to be able to review all files in our smartsheet account. I found an active thread with other customers that have asked for this feature as well.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/109071/give-administrators-full-vision-and-access-to-all-sheets

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Give Administrators full vision and access to all sheets

Idea Submitted · Last Updated 08/17/23

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