With Businessmap Version 13.03, you are getting a brand-new Form Builder application, beautiful interactive widgets for the Businessmap MCP Server, and a wave of AI-powered capabilities inside Whiteboards and Canvas. On top of that, you'll find smarter planning views, richer analytics widgets, more flexible administration, and dozens of quality-of-life improvements across the entire platform. Whether you manage portfolios, run agile teams, or build automations on top of Businessmap, this release has something that will make your day-to-day work faster, clearer, and a lot more fun. Let's dive in!
What's in this release:
- New Application - Form Builder
- Businessmap MCP Server: UI widgets, support assistant & board policies
- AI superpowers in Whiteboards, Canvas & Search
- Planning view improvements
- Whiteboards & Canvas improvements
- Outcomes improvements
- Analytics widget improvements
- Administration, security & SSO
- Data management improvements
- Other updates
New Application - Form Builder
Say hello to the Form Builder — a brand-new Businessmap application that turns form submissions into cards, automatically and effortlessly! With the new release you are able to design custom forms from scratch, from a template, or even with the help of AI, and share them with anyone who needs to submit work to your teams. Every successful submission creates a Businessmap card on exactly the board, column, and lane you've configured — with the right fields, in the right structure, following the process you've defined.
Why will you love it? Because your submitters no longer need to know anything about your boards, workflows, or internal processes. Instead of navigating a board and guessing where and how to create a card, they simply fill in a clear, friendly form — and Form Builder takes care of the rest. Board owners get standardized, consistent incoming requests, while non-technical or external users can submit correct work items with minimal effort and zero Businessmap training. In one sentence: a visual form designer where submissions become Businessmap cards. Intake management has never been this easy!
Businessmap MCP Server: UI widgets, support assistant & board policies
Your AI conversations with Businessmap just got a serious visual upgrade! With this release, the tools of the Businessmap MCP Server that return data now render as rich, interactive widgets instead of plain text. You are able to filter, sort, and explore your data right inside the chat, and even see it grouped in different charts — turning every AI-powered query into a beautiful, functional experience. Instead of scanning long walls of text, you get instant visual clarity: tables you can slice and dice, and charts that reveal trends at a glance.
And the MCP Server itself is getting smarter, too. The Businessmap support assistant is now available as an MCP tool, able to answer the same product questions it handles inside the platform — so you can build far more capable agents that truly understand how Businessmap works.
On top of that, the MCP Server now supports board policies, giving your connected AI assistants access to the working agreements defined on your boards, so their answers and recommendations reflect your team's actual rules.
AI superpowers in Whiteboards, Canvas & Search
Your AI toolkit now travels with you into Whiteboards and Canvas! With the new release you are able to run your custom summaries and prompts directly on cards placed on a Whiteboard — including cards imported from different boards. A new "Custom" option has been added to the "Ask AI" section, visible for workflow cards. Hover over it to see your list of defined summaries and prompts, click one to apply it, add a new one on the spot via the "Add new" button, or edit and delete existing ones from the menu on the right. This unlocks a scenario that was simply not possible before: running AI summaries and prompts on cards across multiple boards, right where your visual work happens.
Brainstorming just met automation, too. A new "Generate cards" option in the AI panel lets you generate cards with AI directly in your Whiteboards and AI Canvas. The AI can use Cards, Outcomes, Docs, and any text objects as context, and the generated cards can come complete with a Title, Description, Color, Priority, and Deadline — turning your ideas into actionable work items in seconds.
And the AI love doesn't stop at the canvas edge: you are now able to run AI Tools directly on the result set of a search, as long as the search is opened from the context of a board. A new sparkles button in the Advanced Search view bar gives you access to the AI Tools available on your current board — press it, pick a tool from the list, and get AI-powered insights on exactly the cards your search found, without ever leaving the search screen. Note that you can run the AI tools on up to 50 cards.
Planning view improvements
We listened closely to your feedback on the Planning views, and this release delivers a whole package of improvements that make planning across initiatives smoother, more powerful, and more consistent. Based on detailed customer input, we reviewed how dependencies behave across the Planning view and the Forecast tab, how planned start and end dates appear on cards, and how the views load and expand — all with the goal of giving you a more predictable planning experience inside Businessmap.
Replanning entire projects is now a breeze! With the new release you are able to multi-select cards in all three Planning view types (workflow, management board, and initiative) using Ctrl+click, and then drag one task to move the whole selection together in time — every card keeps its relative distance to the others, so your project structure stays perfectly intact while the dates shift. New "Select all visible" and "Deselect all" buttons in the toolbar make batch replanning faster than ever.
Last but not least, the full project picture comes to your Team boards: the Planning view is now able to show not only your initiatives but also the child cards of each initiative together with their dependencies — a complete, MS Project-style view of the entire project without needing a Management board. If you've been managing complex, dependency-heavy projects, you are going to feel the difference immediately!
Whiteboards & Canvas improvements
Whiteboards and Canvas get a massive wave of improvements in this release! Your objects can now link out to the world: with the new release you are able to add a hyperlink to text objects, notes, and shapes via the context menu → More → Add link — a neat URL badge appears on the object and opens the link on click.
Sharing has leveled up as well: a new "Share" action in the Whiteboard's context menu lets you share a single Whiteboard across multiple boards through a friendly dialog with filtering and sorting, where every toggle applies instantly.
Working with objects is more flexible than ever. A new Switch type option (context menu → More) converts an object between Text, Note, and Card with a single click, preserving shared styles and proportions — perfect for turning brainstorming sticky notes into real cards (note that workflow cards cannot be switched).
Building hierarchies is now a one-move operation, too: select multiple cards and use the familiar connection dots around the selection to link them all to a parent, child, successor, predecessor, or relative in a single action — drop onto an existing card to create the links, or drop into empty space to create a new card with all links in place.
And to make your boards more beautiful and expressive: a new "Symbols" option (Main Toolbar → More) opens a side panel with over 6000+ symbols organized by category, ready to click or drag & drop onto your Whiteboard / Canvas.
The grid got an upgrade as well — the "Show grid" preference is now simply "Grid" and offers None, Lines, and the brand-new Dots option.
Outcomes improvements
Your outcomes, your rules! With the new release you are able to manage the units of your Outcomes directly in the Administration area — the familiar defaults are all there, including currencies like $, £, €, R$, CHF, C$, and kr, plus suffixes like %, NPS, and time units (s, min, h, d, w) — but now you can edit them, remove them, or add your own, so your key results always speak the language of your business.
On the board itself, a brand-new Outcome tags pill in the Board filter lets you zero in on the outcomes that matter: when you filter by outcome tags, the outcomes element on your initiative cards expands automatically and shows only the matching outcomes.
Connections don't always need calculations, either. You are now able to link an Outcome to another Outcome througly the Whiteboards / Canvas or directly through the outcome's details.
A new visibility configuration lets you choose which Outcome connections to display — "To cards", "To outcomes in a formula", and the new "To outcomes not in a formula" — all visible by default, giving you the full picture of how your results relate.
Analytics widget improvements
Slice and dice your portfolio data like never before! With the new release you are able to filter every column of the Initiatives and Outcomes widget through a new funnel icon in each column header, with filter types tailored to the data: multi-select value lists for statuses and enums, date filters with powerful actions like before, after, between, and relative periods such as today, this week, and this month, number filters with equals, greater-than, less-than, and between, plus text filters with contains and begins-with. Filters combine intelligently across columns, and a set of additional customer-driven refinements makes the widget smoother and more pleasant than ever.
Your delivery analytics learned new tricks, too. The Throughput widget now lets you stack results by Swimlane — the new "Swimlane name" option joins Board name, Owner, Type, and the other Stack by choices, so teams that organize work by lane can finally see exactly how each lane contributes to delivery.
And in the Board Flow Metrics widget, a new "Differentiate blocked cards" option adds a black "Unfinished Blocked" segment alongside on-time (orange) and overdue (red) work — so you instantly see how many of your in-progress cards are actually stuck, and leadership gets a truthful picture of what's really not moving.
Administration, security & SSO
Rolling out Businessmap across a large organization just became much easier! A new security setting lets you control who can create Apps — Everyone, Owners, or Specific users / teams — so you can empower selected people to build Apps like VSM without handing out Owner rights.
Keeping your teams in sync with your identity provider is now automatic, too: a new SSO provisioning setting synchronizes groups from your provider to Businessmap teams — pushed teams are mapped by name or created automatically, users are added and removed based on your provider's configuration, and synced teams are clearly marked in the Teams tab with a full overview table.
Onboarding gets friendlier as well. With the new release you are able to assign User Attributes directly in the Invite User modal — pick attributes from a convenient dropdown, enter their values on the spot, and skip the old two-step dance of inviting a user and then hunting them down later.
And for knowledge governance, a new global Docs setting determines who can share documents with the entire account — the "everyone" sharing option, covering Editor, Commenter, and Viewer access alike, is now under your control.
Data management improvements
Big data migrations, meet your new best friend! With the new release you are able to enable a new "Unlimited allowed values" option on dropdown custom fields — when switched on, there is no easy-to-hit limit to the number of values your field can hold (with the trade-off that board-level overriding, reordering, disabling, and defaulting of values is not available), making it perfect for migrating large datasets into Businessmap.
Card picker fields now speak human, too: card titles are displayed instead of raw card IDs in widgets, reports, and the card revision history, so you always know at a glance which cards are referenced.
And updating cards via import is now friction-free — the Title column is no longer required, neither for creating nor for updating cards, eliminating both the inconvenience and the risk of accidentally overwriting titles you never intended to change.
Other updates
New board filter option - unfinished subtasks
Find the cards that still have work hiding inside them! With the new release you are able to filter your board by unfinished subtasks using a new option in the Board filter — set a numeric condition like "Unfinished subtasks > 0", similar to what you already know from Advanced Search, and instantly surface every card that isn't quite as done as it looks.
VSM: copy/paste arrival/departure rules
Configuring your Value Stream Maps just got dramatically faster! You are now able to copy a non-transition arrival or departure rule from one step and paste it onto another directly in the canvas — hover over a rule to reveal a copy icon, then right-click the target step and choose "Paste arrival rule" or "Paste departure rule" — or simply drag the rule from the panel and drop it onto the desired step, so duplicating your process rules across steps takes seconds instead of minutes.
Add date to exit criteria API response
More context for your process automations! The API response for checked column checklist items now includes the date when each item was checked — the checked_at value is returned alongside the item ID and comment when expanding checked_column_checklist_items on the cards endpoint (note that for some older cards the value may be null where the check date cannot be determined).
Extend Audit logs
Answer your own questions before you even need to ask support! Additional logs have been added to Administration → Audit logs, extending the coverage to essentially all the history the platform keeps — so administrators can trace changes across more resources than ever and get to the bottom of "who changed what and when" in seconds.
Forecast tab settings
Your planning preferences now stick where they belong! The column selection, zoom level, and other view settings in the Planning view are saved per board instead of per initiative — so when you configure the view for one card and then open another initiative on the same board, your carefully tuned setup is right there waiting for you.