Freeze, store, and report on historical projects for trend analysis and compliance within a Control Center portfolio.
Smartsheet Control Center: Project Archiving FAQ
Control Center is a premium offering available for purchase to Smartsheet customers using a Business plan or higher.
FAQs
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 for Program Leads to 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 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 of 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.
Can I archive Smartsheet items that weren’t 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. You can’t restore an archived project.
Can I archive projects automatically?
No. A Program Lead must manually archive projects from within the Control Center app. Control Center then automatically performs the actions that you define for the project archive workflow on all of the selected projects.
Where can I see my archived projects list?
When archiving, Portfolio Leads can select a workspace or specific location for the archived projects to live. To access that workspace, you would have to be the Portfolio Lead who archived the projects, a user with access set during the archiving process, or request to be shared to the workspace.
Who can view and access archived projects?
When Portfolio Leads archive projects in Control Center, they also archive the corresponding Project WorkApps. Archived projects aren't visible to other portfolio users and are no longer available in the Project WorkApps UI in the Smartsheet or mobile app. However, only users who have permission (configured as part of the archive) can see a list of archived projects in Control Center.
Can 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 can 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, you can move it into a Pending Archive workspace where only certain people 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.
