Smartsheet Control Center: Project Archiving FAQ

Project Archiving makes Smartsheet Control Center a full project lifecycle management tool: it enables Program Leads to automate and manage archiving, the final stage of the project lifecycle.

Control Center is a premium offering available for purchase to Smartsheet customers using a Business plan or higher. For more information about how to purchase Control Center, please contact Smartsheet Sales.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the requirements for Project Archiving and who can use the feature?

Project Archiving is available to all customers using Smartsheet Control Center. You must be a Program Lead in Smartsheet Control Center to access Project Archiving: only Program Leads can create and run archiving workflows.

What features are part of Project Archiving?

With an archive workflow, you can:

Set filtering conditions so Program Leads can quickly select projects for archiving.
Provide your project team with a cleaner directory of workspaces by moving projects to archive workspaces.
Change ownership, update sharing, and limit access on projects to preserve historical data for audit and analysis.
Disable Alerts & Actions so that a finished project no longer generates notifications.
Collectively unpublish all archived sheets, dashboards, or reports.
Retain summary data on archived projects so they can be part the portfolio reporting for the fiscal year. (You may still want to archive the summary data at fiscal year rollover.)
Provide a list of archived projects in Control Center in case your team needs to access them for reference at a later time.

Will I be able to archive Smartsheet items that were not created using Control Center?

No. Only items created using Control Center can be archived.

What are common scenarios that Project Archiving supports?

Some common scenarios are:

Complete archival—lock Smartsheet items related to a finished project all at once. Remove finished projects from portfolio level dashboards and reports in bulk, without having to manually edit your existing dashboards and reports.
Archive with limited visibility—lock completed projects and remove access to them, but keep them in portfolio level dashboards and reports until the end of the fiscal year. At the beginning of the next fiscal year, you can remove the archived projects from the dashboards and reports.

Can I restore an archived a project?

Archiving a project is a permanent action. At this time you cannot restore an archived project.

Can projects be archived automatically?

No. A Program Lead must manually archive projects from within the Control Center app. Control Center will then automatically perform the actions that you define for the project archive workflow on all of the selected projects.

Who can view and access archived projects?

Users can see a list of archived projects in Control Center. Only users who have permission (configured as part of the archive) will able to access the project items in Smartsheet.

Will archived projects be removed from search results?

Projects only appear in the search results for people who have access to the project. One of the options in the archiving workflow is to move the project folder to an archive workspace. After the folder is moved, only users with permissions to access the archive workspace will see the projects in search results.

Can I partially archive a project to leave it open for final review or audits?

Yes. Project Archiving supports multi-stage archiving. When a project is completed it can be moved into a Pending Archive workspace where only certain people will have access to it. After any reviews and audits are complete, you can perform the full archive to remove all access and lock the project.