This morning, we announced that Smartsheet has acquired Seattle-based TernPro, Inc., makers of Slope, an application that enables teams to collaborate on and manage creative work.
We continually look for ways to enhance our platform and provide greater value to our customers by building new capabilities or acquiring companies that have created exciting technologies. Slope is an ideal fit for us for two reasons.
First, this acquisition will enable us to bring transformative technology to marketing leaders, teams, and organizations. Like other parts of the business, marketing and creative teams need a work execution platform to capture work requests, plan and manage projects, and report on their work. Yet those teams often require content review features to streamline their content production process. Once fully integrated, Slope’s capabilities will enable Smartsheet users to review, proof, and comment on content (including documents, videos, images, and web pages) in the core application, in addition to offering standalone solutions to solve complex marketing and creative workflows.
Second, as the visual nature of work increases, every organization, team, and individual knowledge worker has to deal with visual content to some extent. We believe that integrating Slope technology will make Smartsheet a more effective tool for all customers by extending new solutions to a broad range of industries and functions beyond marketing. Not only will this help us better serve our customers, but we believe this will also strengthen our leadership position in the collaborative work management (CWM) category.
What’s Next: Integrating Slope With Smartsheet
Once integrated into Smartsheet, Slope’s intuitive content review and proofing functionality will enable Smartsheet users to give feedback on images, videos, documents, and other content directly in the app. Its document review, change notification, and approval workflows will also be integrated with Smartsheet notifications and automated alerts and actions.
In the coming months, the integration of Slope with Smartsheet will enable a range of powerful use cases that save time, augment existing workflows, increase collaboration, and lead to better execution. Here are a few examples of how this integration might enhance your Smartsheet experience:
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Improve Construction Site Inspections: During an inspection at a construction site, a site inspector could use their mobile device to take a picture of a particular issue that doesn’t meet code and then annotate the photo (using Slope technology) to highlight exactly where the problem is and how it needs to be remedied. They can then submit the photo through a form in Smartsheet that is tied to an automated ticketing system to track issue status and resolution.
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Quickly Build and Review Education and Learning Assets: Training teams often build out their curriculum in Smartsheet. Training assets, such as handbooks or how-to videos, could be annotated and critiqued using Slope technology as they’re developed, then marked as completed and ready for use — and tracked from that point forward — within Smartsheet.
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Keep Marketing Materials Current: Product marketing teams use Smartsheet to track product overview materials. A product marketing team that needs to update or re-style product sheets could use Smartsheet to manage the approval process and Slope technology to point to specific parts of materials where copy or visuals need to be changed.
The entire Slope team, including co-founders Dan Bloom and Brian Boschè, have joined Smartsheet. We will continue to support Slope’s existing customers during the integration, and I look forward to what we can accomplish together for our customers.