Businessmap V13.02 - What's New (April 2026) – Businessmap Knowledge Base

What's in this release:

Board view in Canvas and Whiteboards
Custom connector and remote MCP
Docs in canvas
Improve the Outcome feature
AI & MCP Settings
Create a new doc from a card
Improve filter links visualization on a card
Filter by outcome tags in Initiatives & Outcomes widget
Other Updates

Board view in Canvas and Whiteboards

We are excited to introduce Board view, a brand-new way to look at your Canvas and Whiteboards content as a workflow board. With the new release you are able to take the workflow cells you already designed on your canvas and instantly see them as a structured board, with columns and lanes positioned exactly the way you arranged them. If your cells are stacked vertically on the canvas, you get rows in the board; if they are side by side, you get columns. Frames you have drawn around groups of cells are preserved too — they appear as colored sections with the frame's title, so your visual structure carries over without a single click of reconfiguration.

Switching between Canvas and Board view is effortless. You can toggle from the buttons in the top right of the canvas, or use the keyboard shortcuts Alt + Shift + 1 for Canvas and Alt + Shift + 2 for Board. The board comes with everything you expect from a Businessmap board — selecting, moving, blocking, and archiving cards all work natively. The context menu lets you change owners, type, priority, size, and due dates, create links between cards, move cards across the board, and even archive every card in a Done column with a single click. A built-in board filter (just press Ctrl + F) lets you narrow down by title, owners, tags, or custom ID, and double-clicking inside any cell creates a card instantly.

Card visuals in Board view are richer than ever: you see cover images, block indicators, priority, custom ID, title, tags, progress, owners, type, comments and attachments counts, subtasks, size, dates, and watchers — all without leaving the board. And the best part? Your last selected view is remembered automatically, so if you closed your session in Board view, that is exactly where you will pick up.

Custom connector and remote MCP

This is a game changer for anyone using AI assistants. With V13.02, Businessmap provides a Remote MCP server, which means you can now connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI and other compatible AI clients directly to your Businessmap data — securely, with one click, and without ever handing over an API key or a password. Whether you want Claude to summarize your open cards, ChatGPT to draft a status update from your documents, or Cursor to pull tickets while you code, the path is now wide open.

Read the dedicated article to learn how to configure your AI client with Businessmap: Remote MCP Guide

Connecting is built around the OAuth 2.1 industry standard — the same flow you use when you sign in to a third-party app with Google or the like. From your AI client, you simply paste your Businessmap remote MCP URL, log in to your account, and approve the consent screen. From that moment, the AI assistant can act on your behalf — but only within the boundaries of what your own Businessmap user account is allowed to do. The same board permissions, the same role checks, the same access rules — there is no way for an AI to do more than you could yourself in the UI.

Behind the scenes we have invested heavily in security and audit logging of every key event, as well as tight rate limits to protect against abuse. Setup takes about 30 seconds, with no local proxy servers, no CLI installs, and no manual configuration files. You get all 36 of our existing cards-and-documents tools available in your AI client of choice, ready to go.

Docs in canvas

Documents are now first-class citizens on your Whiteboards canvas! With the new release you are able to drop any Businessmap document directly onto a whiteboard, turning your canvas into a true single source of truth where ideas, plans, and reference material live side by side. Adding a doc is as simple as pasting a valid document link into the whiteboard — a document object is created automatically and linked back to the source. Alternatively, you can use the toolbar's Import tools to browse and add any document you have access to, including personal ones, all organized by hierarchy for easy navigation.

The integration goes far beyond just embedding. Your documents are now part of the AI context, which means when you generate Notes, child cards, or Outcomes from a whiteboard, you can select any doc to serve as context for the language model.

Double-clicking a document opens it instantly, you can add up to 200 documents per whiteboard (configurable per company), and we have also improved Note generation along the way — the AI now picks an appropriate sticky-note color automatically from the base palette (white, gray, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, pink), or honors the color you explicitly request.

Improve the Outcome feature

We have polished the Outcome experience based on your feedback. When you copy outcomes from one card and paste them into another, which is possible using the Canvas or Whiteboards, we now create true copies of the outcomes instead of copying the links to the original ones — exactly what you would expect.

A new keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + Shift + V, lets you assign existing outcomes to a card instead of creating new copies, giving you precise control over which behavior you want.

We have also smoothed out the UI for start and target dates, defaulting the start to today and the target to the current year's end, with sensible adjustments if the interval ever shrinks below one month.

AI & MCP Settings

Admins now have full, granular control over which AI capabilities are available in your account. A brand-new AI Settings tab in Administration gives you a master toggle for AI, plus three sub-toggles for fine-grained control over AI in the rich text editor, AI Tools and Assistants, and AI Canvas generations. There is also a dedicated MCP section where you can switch off individual MCP tools or entire categories (cards, docs, boards, columns, lanes, workspaces).

On the user side, every Businessmap user gets a new AI tab in My Account where they can opt out of specific MCP tools for their personal agents — perfect for tailoring what your AI clients see based on personal preference, while admin restrictions always take precedence.

Create a new doc from a card

You can now spin up a brand-new document directly from a card or a template, without ever leaving the card details. A new button opens the document creation flow inline, and when you save the card or template, the document is automatically linked to it. If you create a doc from a template, every card created from that template afterwards will inherit the document link — perfect for standardized processes where you always want a runbook, checklist, or briefing attached to certain types of work.

Improve filter links visualization on a card

Filtering cards by links is much more powerful and visible now. When you filter cards and a workflow is collapsed, a counter appears in its header — for example (3) — showing exactly how many filtered cards live inside, so you know where the results are without having to expand every workflow one by one.

Additionally, in the card's context menu you will also find a new icon next to "Filter links hierarchy" that not only applies the filter but also auto-expands all workflows, columns, and lanes containing matching cards (and collapses the empty ones), giving you an instant, board-wide view of the results.

Filter by outcome tags in Initiatives & Outcomes widget

A long-requested addition: the Initiatives & Outcomes widget now lets you filter by outcome tags directly from the toolbar. Click "Filter data by outcome tags," pick one or more tags from a searchable list, and the widget instantly narrows down to initiatives and cards whose outcomes match. An AND/OR toggle gives you control over how multiple tags combine, matching rows are highlighted with a yellow background, and the widget intelligently expands the hierarchy down to the matching outcome so you never lose context.

Other Updates

Arrival/Departure option to validate child cards' section

You can now build Arrival and Departure rules that evaluate where a card's children are located, giving you finer-grained automation control across linked work items. A new Section condition has been added to the rule configuration, letting your business logic respond to the state of child cards in addition to the parent itself — ideal for workflows where parent cards should only move when all the relevant children are in a specific section of the board.

Option to ignore Arrival/Departure rules from API

API integrations now have a way to bypass Arrival and Departure rules when needed. By passing the `ignore-arrival-departure-rules` header with a value of 1 in your API request, you can perform card movements that skip the rules entirely — useful for bulk migrations, data imports, or scripted maintenance where you do not want side effects to fire. This unlocks new automation scenarios while keeping default behavior intact for regular UI interactions.

Add description field to workflows

You can now add a rich-text description to any workflow on your board, just like you can today for the board itself, columns, and lanes. Use it to document the purpose of a workflow, link to relevant resources, or onboard new team members quickly — the description shows up in the board's sidebar Policies section so it is always one click away.

Revisions of card subtasks

The card history's Revisions section now includes a Subtasks field. You can now see the read-only content of a card's subtasks at any point in its history, giving you a complete audit trail of how the work evolved over time.

Copy link to object(s) in Canvas / Whiteboards

Sharing pieces of a Whiteboard / Canvas is now effortless. Every object has a new "Copy link to object(s)" option in the context menu under More. When you share that link, opening it positions the recipient's screen exactly on those objects and selects them automatically — perfect for pointing teammates to a specific diagram, sticky note, or section without explaining "scroll down and to the right".

Show/hide on card history

Long entries in the card history are now collapsed by default, showing only a few lines with an option to expand them on demand — very similar to how comments behave. If you have ever scrolled past a giant history entry to get to what you actually wanted, this small change will save you a lot of friction.

Persist the widgets sorting

For widgets that show tabular data — WPS, Cards assigned to me, Overdue cards, Timeline report, Search widgets, and so on — the column sort you choose now persists as part of the widget's saved configuration. No more re-sorting every time you open a dashboard. Users without "Manage dashboards" permissions can still apply temporary sorts during their session.

Expand Data Studio widget

The embedded Data Studio (formerly Looker) widget has a new "Fit screen" option, available on all widgets, that expands the container to use almost the full available space on the dashboard. Selecting the option also scrolls smoothly to the widget so you can dive right into your data without any extra clicks.

Custom font size in Canvas / Whiteboards

Whiteboard objects that support text now accept a custom font size value between 1 and 9999, giving you complete control over how your text reads — from tiny annotations to bold headline-sized callouts that pop across the canvas.

Switch shape type in Canvas / Whiteboards

Need to change a circle into a rectangle without losing the work inside it? A new "Switch type" option in the context menu under More lets you convert one whiteboard shape into another while preserving the existing text, common styles, and links to other objects. Reshaping your diagrams just got dramatically easier.

Allow custom email notifications for users without access to the triggering card

A new Security setting in Administration lets you control who actually receives the custom email notifications you configure in business rules. The setting applies to recipients picked through system properties — Owners, Watchers, Contributors, Reporter, Co-owners, and Contributor-type custom fields — and decides whether those people get notified even when they have no access to the triggering card.

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