Smartsheet Control Center: Project Archiving FAQ

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.

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.
• 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 reference them later.

Only projects provisioned through Smartsheet Control Center are eligible to be archived using the Archive automation feature.

Items such as sheets, reports, and dashboards manually created in Smartsheet and not provisioned via Smartsheet Control Center can’t be archived using the Archive automation.

Instead, you need to complete one of the following two actions:

• Move items manually: Manually move these items to an archive workspace or folder.

• Delete items manually: Alternatively, you can delete these items if that aligns with your organization’s needs.

Choose the best approach for your organization and decide whether it’s best to archive the items manually or delete them.

If you replace the project source folder and not provision your project again, archiving fails. 

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 manually editing 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. You can remove the archived projects from the dashboards and reports at the beginning of the next fiscal year.

Archiving a project is a permanent action. You can’t restore an archived project.

No. A Program Lead must manually archive projects from within Control Center. Then, Control Center automatically performs the actions you define for the project archive workflow on all the selected projects.

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.

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 with permission (configured as part of the archive) can see a list of archived projects in Control Center.

Projects appear in the search results only for people who have access to them. One option 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 the search results.

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 can access it. After completing reviews and audits, you can perform the full archive to remove all access and lock the project.