Smartsheet Forward Q3 2024: Innovations that create value and time for the work that matters

Hey there, Smartsheet community!

Our team's been hard at work developing new features and enhancements that we’re excited to share with you. These products and features are designed to revolutionize your workflow and enhance productivity. In this edition of Smartsheet Forward, we're covering remarkable additions to our lineup: the Kanban-inspired board view, AI tools, a robust security suite, and a new way to analyze resourcing data. Each of these innovations has been meticulously crafted to meet the evolving needs of modern businesses, combining sleek design with powerful functionality. Let’s dive into the details of each new feature.

Kanban-inspired board view to keep projects on track

Whether you work in an agile environment or prefer to work more visually, we hope our new board view is a game-changer in your day to day. Modeled after Kanban boards, this view provides clear visibility into task status so you can see what’s in progress, what’s completed, and what’s coming up next at a glance.

With the ability to organize tasks in lanes, show progress, or reassign work by dragging them from lane to lane, it’s a new way to plan sprints, manage product roadmaps, and track tasks to completion in Smartsheet. You also have the option to nest tasks, add subtasks, and reprioritize tasks or change their status and details. Try it out for your next project!

"Board view is great — an exciting addition to the Smartsheet platform. I love that edits are live and updated in real-time, so you don't need to hit save to see your changes and how you can scroll through individual lanes. This has been so helpful for us as we tend to have a large volume of cards in our sheets." — Nick Stafford, Team Lead - Training, Systems and Process, Martin Brower of Canada

Board view joins the recently launched timeline view as one of the many ways you can manage work in Smartsheet. Timeline view is well-suited to visualizing date-based work like marketing campaigns and product launches. We’ve added a cool new feature that lets you display milestone-only timeline views for sheets with just a single date column, in addition to the usual two-date column setup. In the near future, you’ll be able to attach files to tasks and have conversations about your work all in one place.

With each new view launch, we give you more tools to do your best work. You can easily switch between views and enjoy the flexibility to work however you want.

On-the-spot help — just ask AI 

For the last year, generative AI has been at the heart of our mission to empower anyone to drive meaningful change. We believe AI unlocks the potential to use the Smartsheet platform to:

• Tackle business problems: Smartsheet AI keeps you focused on business outcomes without worrying about the technology.
• Supercharge team productivity: Smartsheet AI helps reduce time spent on manual repetitive work and increase efficiency.
• Get quick insights: Whether you’re a portfolio manager or a COO, you’ll derive actionable insights from work data.

We’ve introduced conversational AI tools that understand what you need in everyday language, giving you insights about work. With no need for advanced training, users are empowered to excel. Since their rollout, half of Enterprise plans have embraced Smartsheet AI tools for generating formulas, text, and ad hoc charts and metrics. And, in June, we launched the ‘get help with AI’ tool as part of our Premium Support Package, helping users get answers to their Smartsheet questions without leaving their workflow. 

“I love just typing in what I am looking for and automatically getting the insight I need from my data. This will help me give my supervisor a quick figure without having to create a formula for it.” — Deborah L. Richardson at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center

Next, we’re building AI-powered tools to summarize conversations, create content automation workflows, and generate text at scale, cutting down repetitive work so your teams can accomplish more. Plus, we’re making it easier to generate formulas and charts across entire portfolios of data, giving managers and executives a holistic look into the status of work, just by asking simple questions.

Flexible, secure access management

In today's dynamic digital landscape, secure and precise user access controls are a must. To enhance security and lighten administrative workloads, we are rolling out two new features in the coming months that’ll help you automate user roles and access management as well as provide granular asset control.

These improvements can make scenarios like this one much simpler: Imagine that Jade, a Project Manager in your finance department, transitions to a new role as an Operations Lead in marketing. Currently, you’d have to manually remove her access to all finance assets and grant her access to marketing assets. We’re making this easier with Identity Provider (IdP) managed access.

By defining roles within Smartsheet — such as Finance Project Manager — you can assign access and permissions to specific Smartsheet assets based on these roles directly through your IdP. If someone switches roles, Smartsheet will automatically revoke access to assets associated with the old role and grant permissions for the new role. You can manage all this seamlessly through your existing IdP, making everything more secure and hassle-free.

For granular asset control, we'll be launching a new permission set called Manager iteratively across the platform. It’s designed to bridge the gap between the Editor (can share) and Admin roles in sheets. Many of our customers have expressed the need for certain team members to have more capabilities than the Editor role offers, like hiding/unhiding columns, modifying sheet column properties, or creating automated approval workflow requests. But, they don't need the full access that an asset Admin has.

The new Manager permission set strikes the perfect balance. It will offer essential permissions for advanced data handling and project management while keeping sensitive administrative controls and configurations reserved for Admins.

More detailed insights into people and work

In June, we launched a brand-new way to analyze your resourcing data. Our advanced reports feature brings Resource Management data right into sheets along with pre-built reports and dashboards. Now you can combine your resourcing data with other information like costs and bill rates to calculate profitability and create custom reports with multiple levels of groupings, summary values, custom sorting, and columns. The pre-made dashboards come loaded with charts and graphs that you can tweak to your liking. Plus, we recently enhanced the capacity view (found via the schedule tab) with new view controls. These let you model different scenarios using custom fields and project types to choose combinations of resources and potential investments, and save those models for quick comparison.

At the end of July, we rolled out the highly requested phase connection with project sheets for our Early Adopter Program customers. This enables you to assign, track, and report on time and budgets for specific parts of your project, giving you more flexibility and detailed insights. This feature will be available to all customers by the end of October 2024. We’re also making it easier to assign work by automatically applying a default allocation for assignments. These improvements apply to both Workload Tracking (included in Business and up plans) as well as the premium Resource Management by Smartsheet add-on.

We want to hear your product ideas

That’s all from me for now, but we are eager to hear from you. Please tell us what you think by submitting your product feedback and ideas or voting on ideas shared by your peers. I can’t wait to see some of you at our ENGAGE customer conference from Oct. 8 to 10 in Seattle to share what’s in the works next quarter and beyond!

Until then, 
Ben Canning
Senior Vice President, Product Experiences