The team at Smartsheet has been been hard at work developing new features and enhancements designed to revolutionise workflow and enhance productivity.
Additions to the lineup include the Kanban-inspired board view, AI tools, a robust security suite, and a new way to analyse resourcing data.
Each of these innovations has been meticulously crafted to meet the evolving needs of modern businesses, combining sleek design with powerful functionality.
Kanban-inspired board view to keep projects on track
Whether you work in an agile environment or prefer to work more visually, the Smartsheet team is hoping its new board view is a game-changer in day to day work.
Modelled after Kanban boards, this view provides clear visibility into task status to see what’s in progress, what’s completed, and what’s coming up next at a glance.
With the ability to organise 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. There is also the option to nest tasks, add subtasks, and reprioritise tasks or change their status and details.
“Board view is great — an exciting addition to the Smartsheet platform,” Martin Brower of Canada team lead – systems and process Nick Stafford said.
“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.”
Board view joins the recently launched timeline view as one of the many ways to manage work in Smartsheet.
Timeline view is well-suited to visualising date-based work like marketing campaigns and product launches. A new feature that lets users 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, users will be able to attach files to tasks and have conversations about work all in one place.
On-the-spot help — just ask AI
For the last year, generative AI has been at the heart of a mission to empower anyone to drive meaningful change.
Smartsheet believes AI unlocks the potential to use the Smartsheet platform to:
- tackle business problems: Smartsheet AI keeps users 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 users are a portfolio manager or a COO, they can derive actionable insights from work data.
The team has introduced conversational AI tools that understand what users need in everyday language, giving them 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, the team launched the ‘get help with AI’ tool as part of its 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,” Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center team member Deborah Richardson said.
“This will help me give my supervisor a quick figure without having to create a formula for it.”
Next, the team is building AI-powered tools to summarise conversations, create content automation workflows, and generate text at scale, cutting down repetitive work so your teams can accomplish more. They are also 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, the Smartsheet team is rolling out two new features in the coming months that will help users 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 the finance department, transitions to a new role as an operations lead in marketing.
Currently, users would have to manually remove her access to all finance assets and grant her access to marketing assets. The Smartsheet team is making this easier with Identity Provider (IdP) managed access.
By defining roles within Smartsheet — such as finance project manager — users can assign access and permissions to specific Smartsheet assets based on these roles directly through an IdP.
If someone switches roles, Smartsheet will automatically revoke access to assets associated with the old role and grant permissions for the new role. Users can manage all this seamlessly through existing IdP, making everything more secure and hassle-free.
For granular asset control, the team will 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, the Smartsheet team launched a brand-new way to analyse resourcing data.
The advanced reports feature brings resource management data right into sheets along with pre-built reports and dashboards. Now users can combine 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 users can tweak to their liking. The team also recently enhanced the capacity view (found via the schedule tab) with new view controls.
These let users 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, the team rolled out the highly requested phase connection with project sheets for its Early Adopter Program customers.
This enables users 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. The team is 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.
