One of my hobbies is exploring new technologies
and comparing them with existing ones. It means you find yourself with a new
technology every other couple of weeks or so. And I love this kind of work!!
Here are some glimpse of something i recently explored: Smartsheet!!
‘Smartsheet’ is an innovative technology, an online project
management, collaboration and file sharing tool, very easy to learn and handy
to use. It can be used to track and manage projects, event schedules, task
lists etc. It is available as 30 day free trail, but it has a great internal mechanism
to make users understand and learn things so fast, that anyone can manage to
work with it as a professional within three days. Already a user of excel and
project, this time reduces to just one day. Simple to adopt templates, familiar
(Excel looking) tools, good connectivity options with existing applications
(Excel, MS Project, Google Spreadsheets, Box), and direct export/publish
options makes it real easy-to-use tool.
Combining these with the additional options for Sharing and Collaborating
with teams do provides it an additional advantages for Small and Medium
Enterprises (SMEs), and allows them to overcome their own limitations of resources
and infrastructure. Though large and established enterprises having whole setup
for their own sharing and collaboration infrastructure might find little use of
it (I din’t find any options to plug it in with IBM Lotus Notes / Microsoft
SharePoint / Microsoft Outlook etc.). With such integration options, it might become an
additional handy option for project management within teams/departments of large enterprises also.
Quick options for publishing and online forms
for information gathering also provides an additional edge over other similar tools
in market. Even the enterprise level publishing and reporting tools needs
complex configurations and deployment, which gives this tool extra points for
its time-saving innovation. The ‘Smartsourcing’ concept, still need more
exploration, so would be covering that later. But besides that too, there and
many-many more options (like sending specific rows via email, working with
multiple collaborators, Mobile access etc.) that users would want to explore on
their own.
Few limitations observed/noted as provided in Smartsheet->Help section:
- Size limit of the working (new) sheets: Max limits - 5000 Rows, 200 Columns, 200,000 Cells.
- Size limit for imported sheets: Max limits - 5000 rows, 100 columns.
- Max size of file that can be uploaded : 30 MB (Free collaborators), 250 MB (Licensed Users)
- No Integration with any presentation tool: To give a presentation about the project schedule, you would have to externally use some third party tool.
Some useful links users can use in-handy:
- Smartsheet getting started: http://www.smartsheet.com/help/getting-started
- Help: http://www.smartsheet.com/help
