What is a Solution?
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.
Purpose of a Solution Guide
A solution guide helps all users of the solution understand the purpose and workflow, providing a detailed description, outline, or demonstration of how to use it.
Each SmartSuite Solution library template comes with a pre-documented solution guide and serves as a starting point for developing your own process workflow.
However, once the solution's workflow is customized, the owner of the solution can develop their own comprehensive guide or process document on how to use the solution.
For example, solution guides are useful in the Project Management solution when a company is getting new employees accustomed to their workflows, specific company processes, and task management systems.
How to add a custom Solution Guide
To add or edit a Solution Guide, follow these steps:
Select the Solution by clicking its icon on the home page.
When the solution is open, click on the Solution menu (small down arrow next to the Solution name).
Select Solution Guide.
From the open window, click on the three-dot dropdown and select "Edit Description."
Make your changes and click the Save button to save them.
Instructional Content
When you are editing the guide's content, be aware that it functions exactly like a SmartDoc field - you can use slash commands to embed tables, links, checklists, assign to, and more. Add a table of contents, link to a particular record, and insert an image.
You can use those capabilities to give your team specific guidance, help text, instruction documents, or even embed instructional videos that describe the Solution's process and how to use its individual Tables and Saved Views.
Similar to our solution guides, you could create a step-by-step guide that describes the reporting techniques used in the Solution.
For example:
Export to PDF
You can now generate a clear PDF containing the full content of the Solution Guide. To export the Solution Guide, locate the "Export to PDF" button in the three dots menu.
When you click on "Export to PDF," a standard window for exporting to PDF will appear.
The resulting PDF will include only the content of the guide. All rich text elements will be correctly printed in the PDF.
Viewing Solution Managers
An additional bit of information is displayed on the Solution Guide page - the list of the current Solution Managers for the solution. These are the users who have permission to make modifications to the structure of the solution.
Solution Managers are displayed as small icons in the top-right corner of the dialog. Click on one to open the user's mini-profile for more information about them.