SmartSuite brings together traditional elements of a database, spreadsheet, documents, collaboration tools, file management tools, and automation capabilities in a way that empowers teams to deliver work faster, better - and smarter.
Our goal is to let you do all of your work in a single, unified, and intuitive environment. SmartSuite combines flexible data storage with intuitive interfaces that make navigating easy, updating a snap, and understanding you data intuitive.
Quick Summary
A Workspace: Think of each Workspace as its own SmartSuite account. You can have multiple Workspaces, each on a different payment plan. Most often, a company or team would share access to one Workspace, which gives access to Solutions in that Workspace (depending on permissions levels).
A Solution is a collection of data in SmartSuite, designed to contain all the information related to a business process or workflow. Solutions appear on your Homepage in the form of square icons with a title and an emoji/icon. Solutions are a part of a Workspace, and you can share/copy Solutions from one Workspace to another.
Tables in SmartSuite hold information about one type of item; for example, projects, tasks, campaigns, and products. Each Solution needs at least one Table. Tables appear as their own tab in a Solution.
A Record is an individual item in a Table. Records are the basic unit of data that are pulled into various views and dashboards. Each Record can include data in multiple fields.
A Field is a vertical column in a Table. It contains the details or data (attributes) for each Record in the Table.
The structure can be visualized like this:
What Are Solutions?
Solutions are groupings of Tables that all address a common business process. They acts as containers for their set of Tables, allowing users to navigate SmartSuite content in an intuitive way.
When you first log in to SmartSuite you can see all the Solutions you have access to on your Home Page.
Solutions are identified by a name, icon, and color. Clicking any of the Solution icons will open that solution and display its Tables. Solution Managers can also add solutions from this page. Learn more about managing solutions in this article.
What Are Tables?
Tables are collections of items of the same type, and contain Records that hold information about those distinct items. You may have a Table to track projects, catalog real estate holdings, or list the laptops your IT department manages.
When your Solution involves tracking different types of things or coordinating different processes, it usually makes sense to give each distinct item its own Table. For example, an Event Planning solution might have separate Tables for Events, Schedules, Attendees and Vendors.
The Records that a table contains store individual values for each of the Table's Fields. We'll talk more about Fields and Records below!
What Are Fields?
Fields are the building blocks of Tables, and are the containers for your data. Tables, in turn, are part of Solutions, which group them into logical combinations that can be easily managed by the right team.
Each type of Field is designed to hold a specific kind of information, and with more than 40 types there is a Field for anything you need to store.
You can think of Fields as columns in a spreadsheet... but more powerful! You can store anything from simple text and numbers to entire complex documents, links to other Tables and much more.
Fields can be added to a Table by Solution Managers. Learn more about manage fields in this article.
So then how do Records work?
The Records in a Table pull everything together, holding a series of values - one for each Field in the Table.
Individual Records can be opened in a larger Record View, displaying all of the Fields on a form, like this:
Every Record has a Title Field, which acts like a label or identifier. All the Record's Fields can be viewed and edited by users with appropriate permissions.
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