Collaboration software company Smartsheet Inc. is looking to spread its tentacles further after adding more than 20 new product enhancements to its cloud-based platform at today’s opening of its ENGAGE user conference.

The company also said it’s on the road to achieving a very important certification that will enable it to serve federal government agencies for the first time.

Smartsheet might not be a household name, but the company has steadily built up a strong reputation in the enterprise, with its product being used by more than 70,000 companies worldwide. It sells a “collaborative work management platform” for teams and enterprises that’s designed to manage and automate the tracking, updating and reporting of collaborative projects and processes. This makes Smartsheet’s offering fairly distinct from productivity suites such as Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 and Google LLC’s G Suite, which are more focused on individual documents, spreadsheets and messages.

The product enhancements announced at ENGAGE include a new Smartsheet Accelerator to boost the sales process, a newly redesigned workflow engine, and updated mobile applications.

Smartsheet’s accelerators are “packaged solutions” designed to help users work faster and more successfully. The company already offers accelerators for IT Project Management Office, Mergers and Acquisitions and Professional Services scenarios, and today it’s adding a new Smartsheet Accelerator for Customer Engagements. The idea is to help solve sales challenges by managing the complex processes involved and providing better visibility.

Smartsheet is also throwing in a new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connector, meaning sales teams can easily transition new customers to professional services once they’ve gotten them aboard.

There’s also a new app for project managers. Called Smartsheet Dynamic View, the app provides more granular sharing controls for business leaders. The idea is to make it simpler for them to maintain confidentiality by only allowing specific users access to the underlying sheets for each product.

Those who have followed Smartsheet will know it has made a big deal about extending its automation capabilities in recent months. There’s more progress on this front too, with Smartsheet adding a new “visual workflow builder,” which is a more intuitive flowchart for projects, to replace its old text-based builder. On top of that, the company is adding new date-based workflow triggers and the ability to assign multiple contacts to a task.

The company is also updating its main mobile application with new features including the ability to use native forms and barcode scanning for faster and more accurate data entry.

New integrations are on the menu as well. Smartsheet said its web content widget is now able to embed and interact with content from sources such as YouTube, Viemo, G-Suite, Microsoft Office, Tableau Software and others.

“Our capabilities have expanded in terms of both breadth and depth this year, and our ability to solve for a higher-value set of enterprise use cases has never been stronger,” said Smartsheet Chief Executive Mark Mader.

Smartsheet may soon be looking beyond serving just enterprises, however. The wrapped up its announcements with the news that its been selected by the Joint Authorization Board to take part in the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, otherwise known as “FedRAMP.”

It’s an important milestone for the company because FedRAMP certification is essential for any tech company wanting to sell cloud services to U.S. government agencies. It provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services, with the aim of protecting U.S. citizens’ data in the cloud.

Image: Smartsheet