Smartsheet - The One Productivity App to Bind Them All

Remember the all powerful Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic novel? I can’t help but draw an analogy between the Ring’s malevolent central role in the story’s plot, and the role Email and the attached files play in today’s business operations.

The One Ring slowly but inevitably corrupted its bearer, regardless of the bearer's initial intent. Emails with attached documents inevitably corrupt productivity. Too many threads, too many document versions, too few people doing actual work, too little accountability.

Leaders and managers throughout an organization choose specialty tools to automate their domain from thousands of available project, wiki, collaboration, document, customer and accounting software offerings. Their software tool of choice (their personal “ring”) is purpose built for their kingdom and has little influence or utility elsewhere. The default form of collaboration between departments then becomes email and spreadsheets (not financial or analytical spreadsheets so much as spreadsheets with lists and plans outlined in them).

The question begging to be answered is, “Can we make the common glue into the central system?” Can we take the email and spreadsheets common glue used by everyone and forge it into a benevolent and productive primary system that coordinates people within and outside of their teams.?

Forge a Powerful Online Super-Sheet

It turns out that the secret is not in dramatically changing the elements of the glue, but in changing how they bond to one another. Enabling the common online spreadsheet with the power to attach documents, discussions and alerts to individual rows, transforms it from unwieldy to empowering. It becomes the central figure in the coordination of work and all the information and workflow associated with completing it. Email returns to its core purpose of communicating rather than work tracking.

This new super-sheet can now become the integrator, translator and communicator between the core application platforms. Completing the transformation requires adding real-time integration with the market leading business tools in Financials, CRM, Messaging and Productivity categories (eg: QuickBooks, Salesforce, Google Apps, and Microsoft).

Glue the Business Apps Together with One Tool

Wikis, File Storage, Project Management, Collaboration and Workflow tools meld into one common utility that looks and acts like the shared tool teams have been using all along. Only now, that tool has become the system of Rule.

- Brent Frei