Smartsheet ENGAGE 2023 delivers style, efficiency, and scale

Learn how Smartsheet is delivering innovative solutions to plan your work, do your work, and scale your work.

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At ENGAGE this week, our annual customer conference for Enterprise Work Management, we presented some exciting new innovations that will enable you to do better work at scale. In the keynote we shared how Smartsheet is working to enable anyone at your organization to plan the work, do the work, and scale the work. Additionally, our customer speakers from ADP, Goodwill Industries®, and Sodexo highlighted how they are being successful in their organizations across Modern Project and Portfolio Management, Marketing and Creative Management, and Strategic Transformation. 

As a follow on to our keynote today at ENGAGE, I want to share with you some of the highlights of the keynote in the ethos we’ve approached our innovation strategy all year. That is — how can we make your work more efficient and delightful?

Plan the work: Align people, priorities, and purpose

Planning is the most crucial step in the project development lifecycle. It is within the planning stage that you determine the eventual success of the project or process. You define who will do the work, when it will get done, and how you will measure success. Whether launching something new, establishing your product in a new market, creating engaging experiences for your customers, or keeping and growing the customers you have, we want you to be able to plan with confidence knowing that Smartsheet has everything you need to align your teams around your shared goals. These new enhancements provide everyone — regardless of your plan type — with a critical upgrade to your planning toolkit: 

• Bringing resource management to everyone: People are fundamental to the success of any project, but workload balancing and resource allocation shouldn’t be limited to a single person or team. All customers on Business and Enterprise plans will soon have access to two new features: Workload Heatmap and Workload Schedule. Both will be available directly in project sheets, helping you to quickly identify who is working on what, address over-allocations, and make informed staffing decisions. (Coming soon to our Early Adopter Program)

• New views (Early Adopter Program): To reduce inefficiency while improving customer experience we are evolving. Today we showed you Timeline View, which allows you to see date-based records on a horizontal timeline, integrated into sheets alongside the existing views (grid, card, Gantt, and calendar). Timeline View empowers you to plan and manage time-based work visually whether you are tracking portfolio plans, roadmaps, individual project plans, advertising campaigns, events, or otherwise. We will be showcasing EAP previews of refreshed grid and card view next year — bringing you a super-fast, delightful experience with the reimagination of these two views. 

• New solution-based experiences: To help creators build a useful solution quickly and for team members to more easily navigate and accomplish their work, we’re bringing these capabilities to you:
  • A new template experience focused on powerful solutions rather than individual sheets
  • A new solution panel that makes navigating and managing the solution easy
  • A forthcoming AI-based solution creation that tailors a solution to your needs with simple natural language

Do the work: Work efficiently to achieve more 

Once you’ve planned your solution, it’s time to get started. You gather the tools you need and dive in. Smartsheet has always been a universal solution that can be tailored to resolve even the most complex problem. We are creating key tools available for everyone to make your route from idea to solution simpler than ever. 

Generative AI

Smartsheet is unleashing the power of its platform with AI skills to deliver even more to you all while applying a comprehensive approach to security, compliance, and privacy:

• Analyze data: Your leadership wants to know how sales are performing by region. You have a master sheet with a column tracking all sales values and the regional location of the sales rep. Enter the new AI-powered analyze data skill! You type into the analyze data panel in a sheet: “Show sales performance by region.” Smartsheet then produces a live chart you can add to a dashboard. With a couple more clicks of the mouse, the dashboard is automatically in your brand colors, looking sharp and set to auto-update. Delightful! (Coming soon)
   
• Get help: Need help building, configuring, or extending a solution? The new AI-powered help assistant will provide you with steps to optimize your solution or even debug a formula. (Coming soon)

• Create a custom solution: Create a solution tailored for your unique business needs — just describe what you want to accomplish and AI-powered Smartsheet will create a sophisticated solution in seconds. (Coming soon)

• Generate formulas: Always stumped by formulas? Smartsheet has you covered with the new AI-powered formula builder. It rapidly translates your ideas into ready-to-go formulas to power your process, with an explanation and ability to refine the formula. (Coming soon)

• Generate text and summaries: Smartsheet can write about, translate, and summarize data in your sheet with the power of generative AI. Have a sheet full of products you need ad copy for? Just enter a prompt like  “Write an ad for Social Network for a Category called Item available in Colors closing with a call to action CTA“ into the Generate panel and Smartsheet will deliver ad copy. (Coming soon)

• Caption images: Add an AI-suggested description to images in Brandfolder with one click, to save time and add searchable semantic data to the asset. (Coming soon)
   
  
  • All customers will be able to get help and create custom solutions to get started more quickly and deliver value faster. These features enable our customers to continue moving their projects and processes forward without leaving their workflows.
  • Licensed Enterprise users will be able to generate formulas or text and summaries, and analyze data, at a base usage level. Customers will be able to purchase higher usage tiers based on need. Brandfolder image captioning, people tagging, and basic image editing will also be available in multiple usage tiers as part of Brandfolder pricing plans.

Reimagined content experiences

In our work, it's essential that the content we create and use is relevant and error-free. Plus, to keep things running smoothly, it's important that we can easily find, share, and use the right content alongside what we're doing in Smartsheet. A brand new Content Library will house all of your content within the context of your work. With this enhancement, we're building upon the major investment in our acquisition of Brandfolder, a market-leading digital asset management software, to bring a new content-centric experience to our collaborative work management platform. (Coming soon)

Dashboard themes

With the click of a button, your invaluable data-rich dashboards become a modern colorful masterpiece (Coming soon). Gone are the days of updating each individual widget. It’s now possible to save time while keeping things consistent with multi-widget editing (Coming soon). And it’s easier to layout your dashboard thanks to horizontal and vertical alignment indicators and widget sizing guides that make laying out your dashboard a breeze (Available now). Wider canvases put you in control of your whitespace and new scaling optimizations mean your dashboard can be big — we’re talking movie screen big (Coming soon). And with Dashboard snapshots (Coming soon) you will soon be able to schedule automatic email delivery of your dashboards on a regular basis. 

Scale the work: Transform your business, faster

You’re thriving — your projects and processes have been expertly planned. You’ve done the work, your team is on board, the Smartsheet Desktop app is open on every work laptop. Great work is happening. What’s next? You need to scale this success. Continue your campaign to share clarity and visibility across the organization and banish silos by integrating with your other applications and systems of record. We’re here to help you do it fast — to achieve rapid, scalable value on a secure platform. Here’s how we’re doubling down on scale and performance systems:

• Scaling our underlying platform and features: Today, we announced and demoed platform enhancements designed to support work at a massive scale. Our systems responsible for storing, sharing, loading, and processing your data, cell links, and formulas are constantly improving, meaning lightning-fast data, cell links, and formula processing for you wherever you are. In 2024, each sheet will support five million cells, and five million sheet links (up 250x) per sheet. You’ll feel this performance: No matter how many formulas or links you have, the sheet will open and respond to edits just as fast. (Coming soon)
• Doubling down on managing your project portfolio: We’re increasing our support of individual portfolios to 20,000 projects per portfolio. Last month, we scaled Control Center support to 5,000 projects per portfolio — that's up 5x from the beginning of the year. In January, Control Center will support 20,000 projects — that's 20x the capacity for your teams to run more and better projects. To help you manage this much work at scale, we continue to invest in robust Portfolio WorkApps management experiences by adding the ability to manage multiple administrators, add and remove users from multiple projects at the same time, and consistent archived project views. (Coming soon)
• Smartsheet Safeguard: We’ve created a collection of our most powerful capabilities to help protect and manage your data in Smartsheet that’s now available to purchase by all customers on Enterprise plans. Smartsheet Safeguard extends the foundation of secure collaboration offered by Smartsheet, giving our security-conscious customers access to our most advanced security and governance capabilities, like customer-managed encryption keys (or CMEK), data egress policies, Event Reporting, data retention controls, and more. (Available now)

Smartsheet continues to demonstrate our commitment to your delight and success by delivering innovation across the platform. I’m thrilled to be able to share all of this with you today and so excited to connect with many of you at the conference. If you haven’t watched the keynote yet, visit smartsheet.com/engage to tune in. 

Smartsheet ENGAGE 2023 is our largest customer event, but it’s definitely not the only way to connect with us. We want to hear from you all year long. 

You can connect with peers; contribute to discussions; and share tips in our community; attend regional or interest-based user groups’ and apply to get exclusive, early access to some of our newest capabilities as part of the Early Adopter Program. We’re here to help you drive meaningful change — whether you're using Smartsheet to work on one project or scaling your process to thousands. 

We want to hear from you

Share your ideas directly with the product team in the Product Feedback & Ideas section of the Smartsheet Community.

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