Welcome to Businessmap 11.0! We’ve been cooking some amazing changes for the past several months and they are now materializing in a major new release – 11.0.
The focus of this big release is to:
- Open a whole new chapter called “Whiteboards”
- Integrate even more AI tools
- Deliver a completely revamped version of the board analytics
1. Brainstorm Ideas & Map Your Processes with Whiteboards
Frequently, to develop a work process from scratch, you need a place where to leave your thoughts and visually map your ideas. That’s why in version 11.0, we’re releasing Whiteboards.
With their help, you get a central place where you can brainstorm ideas, create/attach visualizations, build flowcharts and share information with your team. Whether you’re looking to map your process before you build it out on a board, visualize mockups or just have an interactive space for brainstorming ideas, Whiteboards are a great way to do that.
Whiteboards are designed to be very flexible and available across the platform. You can use them from various places:
1. The sidebar on your board
2. Inside the description, subtasks and comments of work items (card or initiatives)
3. Inside Rich Text widgets
Our strategy has always been to replace several tools with a single platform. Releasing the Whiteboards functionality is a big step to check one more category. And that’s just the beginning of what Whiteboards will be capable of doing. Stay tuned!
Take a look at our dedicated article to learn more about whiteboards in Businessmap.
2. Streamline Work with AI Prompts
Moving on, we’re advancing the use of AI in the product with the help of a dedicated AI prompt center available in the board sidebar.
With its help, you can create predefined prompts that the system can use to:
- Generate comments and emails
- Generate subtasks
Think of it as a place where you provide the Businessmap AI with context on how it should generate comments/emails or subtasks based on the details of a given work item (card/initiative).
As a result, once you open up a card/initiative on your board, you can use this custom prompt to generate AI comments or subtasks for your work item.
Imagine that you’re a software service provider that sells custom solutions to your customers. You’ve got a specific support workflow where you receive service-related requests from existing customers. You can use the AI tools inside Businessmap to describe this context to the system and ensure it addresses important topics (such as what is the usual turnaround time for support tickets).
Based on the details of the request from your customer and the prompt you’ve created, Businessmap’s AI assistant will help you generate a suitable response for your scenario.
Learn more about the AI Tools menu in Businessmap.
NOTE: The AI tools that we provide as part of the standard license are typically paid add-ons in most of the competitive products on the market. We reserve the right to limit the usage or convert them to a paid add-on, depending on the usage of each customer.
3. Embrace a More Precise Data Tracking with our Revamped Analytics Module
To start off this release, we’d like to share that we’ve revamped our Analytics module to ensure even more precise workflow data analysis across your organization.
3.1. Why Are We Doing This?
As Businessmap has steadily grown into a complete platform for organizational work management, our customer’s needs have naturally grown bigger. Logically, as processes evolve, the way to measure efficiency needs to evolve too.
Our goal has always been to create a product that adapts to your processes without ANY restrictions, not the other way around. To accomplish this goal and UNIFY the accuracy of data tracking across the entire platform, we’ve taken the decision to revamp our Analytics module.
This update allows more accurate metrics for complex cases such as work moving back and forth across multiple workflows and boards while eliminating data discrepancies within the platform, so you can better optimize your end-to-end organizational processes.
3.2. What Changes To Expect?
For the time being, once you access the Analytics module, you will see a message on top informing you about the update. To ensure a smooth transition, you will still be able to switch to the old version. Keep in mind that by default, the system will load the new version of each chart.
Having said that, as part of this update, there are some visual changes across most of the charts in the module.
NOTE: Don’t forget to read more about where those changes are and how they can affect your data analysis HERE.
4. Manage Your Board Sidebar Icons
To help you declutter your boards and improve visibility, you can now control what icons you see on the board sidebar. In other words, you will be able to choose your favorite options and display their icons on the sidebar, while leaving the rest hidden.
You can enable/disable your most used options from the “3 dots” on the sidebar as well as set up a custom order for your icons.
5. Automate Updates with Recurring Announcements
Moving on, we’re building on the announcements we released last month by allowing you to create recurring announcements. These are great for periodic updates or frequent reminders to users in the account.
To schedule an announcement, you have the same advanced options as you do with the recurring business rules. One common use case is to create a recurring announcement to remind users to log their working hours at the end of the week. The setup can look like this:
To learn more about announcements and how to automate them, don’t forget to check our dedicated article.
6. Other Improvements
6.1. Custom Field Descriptions
Moving forward, to provide more information to your team what a given custom field is about, you can now add descriptions to them. The descriptions are available when creating or editing a custom field in your account.
6.2. Visualize Deadlines in Your Planning View
Other than that, it’s now possible to visualize deadlines as an additional column inside your planning view.
6.3. Board Filter Improvement
Lastly, to further improve visibility, we’ve made some improvements to our board filter too. From now on, when using the filter’s text field to refine your work items, you will be able to:
- Auto-expand populated columns and lanes
AND/OR
- Auto-collapse unpopulated columns and lanes
7. Updates from Our Solutions Architecture Team
In version 11.0, we’re excited to introduce:
- A new tool that lets you merge custom fields of the same type. This is perfect for combining data from multiple custom fields into one across different boards. Check it out here.
- An updated version of our Outlook Add-In, featuring enhanced security and stability. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can give it a go here.
Enjoy exploring Businessmap 11.0!