Editor’s note: In this article, our Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Vozka introduces WorkApps, our new no-code platform that can help you streamline your work and simplifies collaboration with easy-to-navigate apps built directly from Smartsheet dashboards, sheets, forms, and more.
Every day, business process owners like you create and deploy thoughtful, sophisticated Smartsheet solutions incorporating multiple sheets, forms, reports, and dashboards to solve business challenges. While building with these Smartsheet capabilities helps you collaborate and gain visibility into the work being done, wouldn’t it be great if you could easily package everything up into an intuitive app, and share exactly what your stakeholders need to take action?
That’s why we built WorkApps, our no-code platform that streamlines your work and simplifies collaboration with easy-to-navigate apps built directly from sheets, forms, dashboards, reports, and external content like Tableau dashboards or Google Docs.
Whether you’re working from a laptop at home or reviewing projects on your mobile device, WorkApps gives you, your team members, and project stakeholders access to the right information at the right time — based on their respective roles and from the same underlying datasets. During a time where speed and visibility are everything, WorkApps can help you streamline your workflows — no matter the scale — and make collaboration easier.
"I have been waiting for a solution like WorkApps that can give us quick and easy access to the content we need, when and where we need it. The ability to take our Smartsheet assets, along with other tools we use, and package an entire solution in an intuitive app will make it even easier to drive active participation from everyone involved in the process, no matter their role."
—Hina Patel, Director of Sales Operations, Cisco
Streamline work, for everyone involved
We believe that no matter your industry, building in WorkApps will help streamline your work. Whether it’s a small app to manage a team’s weekly meeting or a companywide app shared across teams in marketing, IT, operations, and sales, apps scale up or down based on the needs of the business with the same enterprise-grade, multi-level security from Smartsheet:
- Apps have a natural, familiar feel that helps stakeholders with no knowledge of Smartsheet find their information and take action.
- Every experience is tailored to a person’s role, and you'll all work together from the same underlying datasets.
- Apps are mobile and web-enabled from the start; when solution builders create an app, it’s automatically optimized across all operating systems.
What does this look like in action? Imagine you manage operational requests from your marketing organization, processing video creation, website updates, email campaigns, and so on. Your team manages this program from three sheets, each with their own dedicated form.
One common pain point you want to solve for your marketing team is giving them one place they could go to submit their forms and follow up on any type of request. This can improve and speed up the onboarding experience for new marketing employees, and they wouldn't have to be Smartsheet experts to get started.
With WorkApps, you can do just that. You can build an app for the marketing team that has a home page with context about the program and points of contact if they need assistance, all of their forms in one place, and a report where each member of the marketing team can monitor the status of their requests. In the same app, you can create a separate role for your team members who will be responding to these requests, making it easier for them to find their assigned work and take action.
Even better, you can do all this without having to give them access to the underlying sheets or reports. Stakeholders can just go to their app and have access to everything they need, and you don’t have to worry about a column or rows getting accidentally deleted, or your solution breaking.
Build apps to meet your unique needs
Any solution your company invests in should be flexible, and give you the ability to adapt as your business needs change. The scope of projects and departmental processes can change, and WorkApps can help you stabilize both by giving you an intuitive experience that’s easy to repeat. As a bonus, you don’t need to be a coding whiz to get going:
- You can utilize all of your Smartsheet content — sheets, dashboards, reports, and even external content like Tableau dashboards or Google Docs — regardless of the simplicity or the complexity of your business needs.
- You can personalize the app with your company’s branding — these customization touches will make the solution look like it was specifically built by and for your company.
- App builders can grant access to view or edit data in sheets or reports, without giving team members the ability to make changes to the app’s structure. This helps you protect the integrity of your solution while ensuring stakeholders can contribute.
Combining your know-how and ingenuity with WorkApps can lead to a rewarding experience for all your stakeholders, regardless of the size or scope of your project. They can track and interact with all of the Smartsheet content relevant to their work. In addition, you can sign up and build your own solution or choose one of our WorkApps templates designed to help you get started.
Scale your solution, wherever you work
WorkApps empowers you and your team to achieve, whether you’re working in the office, at home, or at a job site. While this sounds great, your IT team might be curious about the security and scale of the apps you build:
- Our no-code app builder helps you take sophisticated solutions and launch them as an app — within minutes.
- Apps come with the same enterprise-grade, multi-level security you’ve come to expect from Smartsheet.
Once you jump into WorkApps, you’ll be able to quickly create solutions that improve processes and create clarity around how you organize projects. From a security perspective, building in WorkApps is as safe as using Smartsheet, and we’re working on more capabilities to enhance the platform.
With your creative spirit, we know you’re going to do awesome things with WorkApps. We can’t wait to learn about how it helps you simplify work and improve collaboration with your team, coworkers, and vendors.
