Amplify your powers: 4 key takeaways from the ENGAGE 2022 opening keynote

Adapt quicker, work more effectively, scale confidently — these were just a few of the takeaways from the impactful stories told by Convergint, McLaren F1 Racing, and TIME on stage during the opening keynote of ENGAGE 2022. The latest Smartsheet product enhancements were announced as well. Designed to help teams and organizations get up to speed quickly and do better work, faster and at scale, the keynote highlighted how the platform empowers team members to amplify their powers and maximize the work that matters. In case you missed it, here are four key takeaways from the opening keynote. 

1. Teams get up to speed even more quickly and work faster with Smartsheet.

Senior Vice President of Engineering, Cynthia Tee, announced a frictionless way to get your team started on the platform. “We built a new onboarding experience that gets to know you and what you need, to help you and your team collaborate and get your work done,” said Tee.

In just a few clicks, new users can pick their role and the kind of work they need to manage so they land in an experience that’s optimized to their needs. And, it’s all set up with a sheet, dashboard, and report right out of the gate, that can immediately be shared with the team. 

What’s another important part to effectively driving work? Your ability to find and access the systems you have in place to manage your work. Asset Hub reimagines the Smartsheet Home experience. You can find whatever you’re looking for like sheets, reports, dashboards, and WorkApps — and open them with one click. Plus, we’ll keep working to make Home smarter so it adapts to your needs. 

And Desktop App — available soon — will help you stay focused and organized. You can go right into our new Desktop App from your taskbar — or launch it directly from Slack or Teams — to see all your tabs and project work in one place.

Whether you’re on day one or you’re a Smartsheet power user, the upcoming enhancements make it easier to get started and get your work done. 
 

2. Smartsheet is committed to enterprise-grade security and scalability.

Chief Information Security Officer Chris Peake detailed how Smartsheet is dedicated to delivering on enterprise-grade security. “When we say enterprise-grade, two things determine that: security and scale,” he said. “We live up to our responsibility to continuously make improvements ‘under the hood’ with security measures to keep our customers’ business-critical information secure.” 

Here’s a peek under the hood of the new security enhancements: 

• Custom Email Domains are guaranteed to keep your security team happier. It reduces the risk of social engineering attacks by making your company emails easier to identify and to trust. This new capability ensures that emails don’t have those scary “external” warnings, get filed away in another inbox folder, or get flagged as suspicious. 
• Data Egress Controls allows administrators to prevent data from leaving Smartsheet by limiting actions like saving a new copy, publishing, and printing. This ensures that your private company and customer data remains private.
• A direct integration with Okta’s active directory service will simplify and streamline account management for the organizations that manage employees using the Okta platform. 
• Deactivate User is a more scalable means of removing users from Smartsheet that eliminates the need to reassign or delete content. 

And, when it comes to scale, Smartsheet Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering, Praerit Garg, also announced the general availability of DataTable as part of the Advance Gold Plan. Until now, data from other sources could only be imported to sheets. So we designed a means to support integration at a massive scale with DataTable, which enables you to bring MILLIONS of records of data from external systems into Smartsheet to better visualize and collaborate on previously siloed data.   
 

3. The right people are focused on doing the right work with Smartsheet. 

Today, we’re making it easier than ever for your project teams to execute their best work, in the most efficient way. 

Senior Director of Product Management, Eric Bergman, announced Portfolio WorkApps as part of the Smartsheet Project and Portfolio Management solution. “It really helps simplify what you’re sharing with your team, making it easier for them to find and contribute to their projects in Smartsheet and to prioritize their most impactful work,” says Bergman. 

With Portfolio WorkApps, every member of your project team — the project managers, those doing the work, and the stakeholders — all go to a single WorkApp to access the information they need. You can see Smartsheet objects like sheets, reports, and dashboards, as well as external content, like Google Slides and Tableau dashboards. Portfolio managers can configure tailored collections of project resources and all roles, pages, and permissions can be deployed with a click of a button in new instances of Control Center. 

We also announced that Capacity View is coming soon to Resource Management by Smartsheet. With this new view, portfolio managers will better understand which teams and individuals have the capacity to take on new projects. 

4. Your team can deliver world-class, high-value content with unparalleled speed.

Organizations are faced with an enormous demand for content, which can be challenging. But with Smartsheet and Brandfolder together, your teams are equipped with the tools they need to deliver on this demand. 

Smartsheet and Brandfolder work together to connect each phase of the iterative content lifecycle — from ideation, to creation, to distribution, and on to informing future brand stories — so they can deliver world-class content experiences at scale.

McLaren Racing amplifies its marketing operations 

CEO of McLaren Racing, Zak Brown, joined Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader on stage to talk about McLaren’s experience with Smartsheet and Brandfolder. Thanks to AI and machine learning, race weekend images are automatically tagged based on logo recognition, making those images available to share with its partners and on social media within minutes instead of days. 

“The addition of Smartsheet and Brandfolder to our technology suite made an immediate impact on our work, and it continues to push us to improve on our processes to find the next competitive edge,” said Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing.  
 

But that’s not all! Tune in for more key takeaways. 

These are just a few of the highlights from the opening keynote for ENGAGE 2022. Catch all of the product announcements and tune into the impactful stories from the customers that took the stage in this recording of the complete keynote. 

Want more takeaways and highlights from the conference? The best of ENGAGE 2022 will be available on-demand soon. Or keep the conversation going with the Smartsheet Community.