Oct 313 min read

Smartsheet Engage

Unveiling Key Highlights from the Smartsheet Engage Conference

Molly Yanus and Kelly Pratt brought back insights from the recent Smartsheet Engage Conference in their recent webinar last week. Keep your eyes peeled as they dive deep into a host of topics. Check out the full video here.

Smartsheet: The What's and Why's

There was a diverse range of participants, from novices to professionals at the Smartsheet conference, making it a vibrant mix of knowledge sharing and learning. One of the key focuses of Smartsheet has been providing specific messaging for different use cases like PMO, marketing and content management, creative operations, and service delivery, steering clear from CRM. They have built a platform flexible enough to be utilized by diverse teams across different industries.

Three key themes surfaced during the conference - scale, collaboration, and integration. The expansion of Smartsheet's product roadmap ensures scalability with more data management and new features like table view. It also emphasizes collaboration with features like collections and file library, along with the integration of AI tools.

Delving into New Features: Table View - The Big Leap

The new table view feature, although currently in the preview stage, facilitates better data management, speedier load times, and provides efficiency gains. The interface of Smartsheet is even more user-friendly due to their formula editing enhancements.

A novel functionality, collections, was also introduced, which acts like a more specific folder sharing option. With collections, users can create asset clusters for specified audiences allowing granular permission control over each asset.

The file library feature tied to each workspace, which is a document management tool comprising handy features like annotation, versioning, search and tagging, filtering, and sorting.

A Peek into the Future

The roadmap of product enhancement also pointed towards the transition from grid view to table view, incentivizing users with unique features like cascading conditional formatting. It also marked the advent of digital asset management capabilities after the acquisition of Brandfolder. This shift towards consolidation echoes the growing industry trend towards using fewer software solutions.

The proposed enhancements also extend to sectors such as program reporting, dynamic views, and resource management. Exciting additions like timeline view and board view are being developed, with timeline view soon to be available.

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The AI Revolution

An intriguing aspect of Smartsheet's evolution has been their foray into powerful AI tools. These tools fall into three categories - data analysis, formulas, and text, and summaries tool. Users can now ask questions to their data, generate formulas based on input, and generate ad copies, translate text, summarize data respectively.

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Another noteworthy feature is data linking, which simplifies the task of drawing data from different sheets, thereby reducing the need for complex formulas.

Updates & Features Round-up

Several essential updates and feature enhancements were discussed:

Seamless experience: Smartsheet is taking bold strides to mitigate the need for separate add-ons and deliver a seamless user experience.
Global updates and multiple updates: Plans to introduce global updates from control center into Smartsheet UI and enable users to make multiple updates simultaneously were announced.
Program reporting: The already released functionality allows users to select specific templates within a blueprint and automatically pull data from any project into a report.
Dynamic views and data linking: Smartsheet intends to enhance features like navigation in workspaces and data linking.
Resource management: Advanced reporting and resource management integration were revealed, which allows creating Smartsheet reports with resource allocation data and build charts and dashboards.
New views: Smartsheet is investing in new views, including timeline view and board view.

Smartsheet's Pricing Model and User Experience

Molly and Kelly acknowledged the importance of user experience, and emphasized Smartsheet's shift to a user model. They outlined how users can influence licensing and ensure returns on investment in Smartsheet.