Smartsheet has revealed its next generation Smartsheet platform featuring new product capabilities that unlock solution building, AI-driven data insights, and massive scale during its annual ENGAGE customer conference.

Whether opening new healthcare clinics, managing acquisitions, or running marketing programs with tens of thousands of projects simultaneously, Smartsheet supports its customers as they take on more complex and mission-critical workloads.

"Business is being disrupted and companies are looking for a platform that will revolutionise how they work and innovate at scale," says Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet. 

"We are investing in our leading enterprise work management platform to meet customers where they are and help them scale with our new and enhanced features."
 
The next generation of the Smartsheet platform will make it easier for customers to drive value with new, powerful features and experiences including:

       Taking project portfolio management to new heights: Customers can now run more projects consistently, at scale, and with ease. By January, Smartsheet Control Center will support 20,000 active projects per business program, a 20x year over year increase.

       Amping up speed and scale: Smartsheet is constantly improving its systems responsible for storing, sharing, loading, and processing data, cell links, and formulas so customers experience lightning-fast speed no matter what is happening in their sheet. In 2024, every sheet will also support five million cells and allow five million sheet links an increase of 250x above current levels per sheet.

       Elevating user experience with new ways to visualise data: Customers can soon use the new Timeline View to give teams a big-picture look into date-based work. Organise data into visual groups, e.g., by assignee or status or surface big milestones making it easy to see key dates at a glance. The company will also preview its refreshed Grid and Card Views built for modern workloads with visual simplicity and real-time collaboration in mind.

       Generating stunning, data-rich dashboards with ease: Customers can soon create more modern, colourful dashboards with dashboard themes. Make laying out widgets a breeze with new alignment indicators and sizing guides, save time and create consistency with multi-widget editing, and build bigger dashboards with new scaling optimisations and wider canvases. Smartsheet will also release dashboard snapshots allowing customers to schedule regular, automatic delivery of any dashboard.

       Democratising resources across any team: 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, giving traditional and citizen project managers the ability to quickly identify who is working on what, address over-allocations, and make informed staffing decisions to deliver successful projects every time.

       Advancing protection for the most security-conscious: Enterprise plan customers can now purchase Smartsheet Safeguard, a collection of the platforms most advanced security and governance controls including customer managed encryption keys, data egress policies, event reporting, data retention controls, and more.

"Businesses are increasingly relying on intuitive, collaborative work management (CWM) to help them adapt quickly and keep pace with change in todays rapidly evolving environments," says Melinda Ballou, Research Director, Agile ALM, Quality & Portfolio Strategies.

"Improving platform scale to support larger, more complex workloads and functional capabilities that enterprises require given global drivers for flexible work are key to expand and deepen CWM adoption," she says.

"Every team needs three interconnected dimensions to accomplish something great: how you manage work, the people doing the work, and the content they are creating. Its the foundation of what makes every project a success, but to get there, teams need to have the right tools in place," adds Ben Canning, senior vice president product experiences at Smartsheet. 

"The next generation of Smartsheet will help our customers better connect the three dimensions of work, and we cannot wait to see how they test the limits of whats possible."

Putting Generative AI to work
Smartsheet is continuing to build out its new generative AI (GenAI) capabilities, skills which will be deeply integrated to help power the next generation of Smartsheet's platform. Now in private beta, customers can leverage GenAI to:

       Analyse data for fast insights and visual charts via simple conversational prompts. Initially, this skill will focus on individual sheets; in the future, insights will be derived from data across thousands of active projects and data stores, unlocking new portfolio-level insights.

•        Get help from Smartsheet's AI-powered help assistant, which gives customers customised, natural language responses tailored to their work.
•        Create a custom solution in seconds. This skill generates tailored solutions for customers based on their response to the question, What do you want to do?
•        Generate formulas or content such as sheet summaries and translations based on a simple description of what information a user wants.
•        Effortlessly generate image captions in Brandfolder by Smartsheet to streamline content management and save hours of work.