OpenAsset vs. Smartsheet

If you tag your items with keywords correctly, it is a great resource for quickly finding the digital assets you want. I had meticulously gone through all of our digital assets adding keywords for several categories which made searching for specific items very quick and easy, as well as relevant. OpenAsset is also great for automating the creation of PowerPoint presentations and data sheets. It is a project-based software meaning it works best for those in the AEC industry that sort and store digital assets based on the projects to which they are associated. If you are in a marketing firm or other non-project-based business model then another DAM system would likely work better for you.

Incentivized

Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior

Incentivized

• Automated PowerPoint presentations
• Automated data sheet generation
• Searching for digital assets based on keywords, project types, location, and personnel
• Maintaining albums for quick access to the most used project digital assets.

Incentivized

• Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
• Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
• For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc

Incentivized

• You can create an album to share with those outside of your firm, but the only way to do this is to download files into a zip file. This is antiquated thinking. It would be much better if you could create an album that would generate a temporary web page that anyone outside of the organization could view by clicking on a link.
• There are a number of legacy items that are no longer functional. OpenAsset needs to either make these functional or remove the options.

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.

Incentivized

It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.

I have evaluated MediaValet on a couple of occasions. It is a much more budget-friendly system that is not necessarily project-specific in its architecture. It is much more general in nature in the industries it can target. OpenAsset's integration with Deltek Vantagepoint is a big selling point if you have both of those applications. If you don't have Vantagepoint, MediaValet might be a good alternative to consider.

Incentivized

Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!

Incentivized

• Made the creation of PowerPoint presentations and data sheets much quicker and easier
• Allows for customization of keywords for different user groups.
• Doesn't offer any useful reporting. We wanted it to tell us things like how often a particular image or project was referenced. It can't do that.
• Easy uploading and tagging system.
• Using the DAM as a liaison for populate the website with information from our CRM helped maintain consistency across channels.

Incentivized

• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

Incentivized