One of my favorite things about Smartsheet is that it’s built to empower everyone to improve how they work — from the legions of individual contributors that drive an organization’s productivity and results, to managers and directors, to the leadership team.
At our recent annual customer conference, ENGAGE 2023, I heard from so many of you in all types of roles and organizations about the ways you are creating impact — in both your day-to-day work and in your communities — and how these product innovations enable you to do what you do best. Although 4,000 of our customers and partners joined us live at ENGAGE, I know so many of you are eager to learn about the most exciting updates we announced. Additionally, we’re pleased to share even more upcoming enhancements that we didn’t get the opportunity to tell you about.
As we continue to build out the Smartsheet platform, we’re focusing our efforts across four critical dimensions that, as The Enterprise Work Management Platform, we are well-equipped to address: Work, People, Content, and Scale — all of which are infused with AI.
Work: Making it happen faster and easier
As the market leader that helped create the Collaborative Work Management (CWM) category, Smartsheet has been on the forefront of reimagining modern work for years. This year, we haven’t stopped pushing boundaries to improve how users work across each element of the Smartsheet platform.
Announced at ENGAGE
- New card view: Soon, Smartsheet Early Adopters (EAP)1 will be able to access a preview of the new card view. Card view is a favorite among project managers, creatives, and agile teams because it organizes tasks into vertical lanes and makes it easy to prioritize and reassign tasks using drag and drop. The new card view will launch with several exciting enhancements: continuous auto-save, improved editing seamlessly integrated through a new right panel experience, the ability for quick creation of one or many cards in a lane, and nicer image handling. New card view will deploy alongside the classic card view so that you can easily switch back and forth between the two as needed. These changes are just the beginning — stay tuned for more improvements across all views.
- Generative AI: Embracing and applying new technology, Smartsheet will be threading a number of AI-powered capabilities throughout the platform to help your users unlock the power of Smartsheet in record time. In Q4, those in our Early Adopter Program will be able to leverage exciting AI-powered skills to help you generate formulas, get help, create text and summaries, and analyze data. For details on each of these skills, check out my last update from ENGAGE. The first AI feature, AI formulas and generative content, is available now to our members of our Early Adopter Program!
Beyond these significant enhancements, we’re excited to announce a few additional capabilities you can expect to see within the next few months.
- Easier dashboard updates: With multi-widget editing you’ll be able to select and edit multiple widgets at the same time, so you can update widget properties across the whole dashboard at once, instead of one by one. (Available now)
- Mobile support for Portfolio WorkApps: Soon, you’ll be able to update the status of your projects, view your portfolio dashboard, and collaborate with your team from your Android or iOS mobile device — while still getting the role-based experience for project and portfolio stakeholders. (Coming by January 2024)
People: The heart of project success
Announced at ENGAGE
- Resource Management features in Smartsheet: People are at the heart of any project's success, and the responsibility of workload balancing and resource allocation should not fall on the shoulders of just one individual or team.
- Workload Heatmap and Workload Schedule: Managers can quickly identify who is working on what, tackle over-allocations, and make data-driven staffing decisions, so that projects are delivered successfully every time. Soon, Smartsheet Early Adopters (EAP)1 with Business or Enterprise plans will be able to benefit from these two new resourcing features. (Coming by January 2024)
Content: Work beyond the grid
Announced at ENGAGE
Your content will soon be easier to find, share, and use within Smartsheet.
- Content Library powered by Brandfolder: With the fully-integrated product experience of the new Content Library, your organization will be able to house all content within the context of your work, making collaboration easier and more efficient. (Coming spring 2024)
Scale the work: Transform your business, faster
Announced at ENGAGE
We have been continuing to evolve the Smartsheet platform so you can execute your work at scale. Some of those enhancements are:
- Many complex formula computations are now running 10 times faster.
- Early next year, Control Center will support 20,000 active projects per blueprint — that’s up 20x year over year — for unparalleled project portfolio management.
- In the second half of 2024, each sheet will support five times more scale than they could previously, bringing sheet capacity up to a million rows, with five million cells, and five million sheet links per sheet. That’s a 250x improvement to cross-sheet cell linking, which plays an instrumental role in aggregating data across sources on your portfolio.
Beyond these scalability increases, there are two other elements that represent core components of your organization’s readiness to adopt and implement Smartsheet at scale: Security and administration. Smartsheet has you covered on both fronts.
- A suite of our most advanced security and governance capabilities: If you’re particularly security-conscious or work in a highly-regulated industry, you’ll love Smartsheet Safeguard, a collection of advanced security and governance capabilities that builds upon our foundation of secure collaboration. Safeguard includes customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), data egress policies, event reporting, data retention controls, and more. All of our customers have the option to purchase this suite for added security and control of your data at every step of its journey. (Available now)
- Insights for SysAdmins: To help make informed decisions, Smartsheet Admins need visibility into how their teams are using the Advance capabilities that they’ve purchased. Customers that have Data Shuttle and Dynamic View on their plans can get visibility into how these capabilities are being used with Plan Insights. System Administrators will be able to see things like the number of workflows or views created, number of Dynamic Views shared and Data Shuttle workflows executed, and more. Trend lines will also be available to track monthly usage growth. (Coming by December 2023)
- Enhance security and governance at scale: Since you trust Smartsheet with your private enterprise data, we’re focused on strengthening your ability to enforce security across each dimension of collaboration. Soon, Smartsheet Early Adopters using the Enterprise plan will be able to enforce governance policies that require external collaborators log in using corporate accounts, in tandem with multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods. (Coming by January 2024)
We want to hear from you
With the continued evolution of the Smartsheet platform, we’re excited to help make today’s most difficult challenges easier for you. And to do so, we want to hear from you!
For early access to our product releases, Business, Enterprise, or Premier plan users may sign up to join our Early Adopter Program. To make your perspective heard, please engage with my team and add your voice to the Smartsheet Community, or submit a product enhancement request.
As the leader in enterprise work management, we’re committed to continue to improve, enhance, and extend our platform to deliver even more value for you and your organization.
Looking forward to the journey together.
Ben Canning
Senior Vice President, Product Experiences
1 The Smartsheet Early Adopter Program is available to licensed users on a Business, Enterprise, or Premier plan. Functionality is pre-released to the Early Adopter Program to gather critical customer feedback that is incorporated prior to launch.