Welcome to our latest Borealis release! This update brings a powerful set of enhancements designed to make stakeholder engagement simpler, smarter, and more connected than ever. From seamless team-based user groups and stronger consultation traceability, to conversational AI and automatic Microsoft 365 integration, every improvement in this release is focused on removing friction and helping your work flow naturally. The result? Less manual effort, clearer accountability, and a Borealis experience that works quietly in the background—so you can focus on what matters most: building trusted relationships and making informed decisions.

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User Groups — Powering Team-Based Work in Borealis

Work doesn’t happen in isolation—it happens in teams. With our latest release, User Groups bring a smarter, more scalable way to assign work, communicate, and report across Borealis.

Until now, tasks, issues, agreements, and notifications had to be assigned one user at a time. For growing or cross-functional organizations, this meant extra effort, brittle setups, and constant adjustments as teams evolved. User Groups change that. They introduce reusable team structures that move with your organization—keeping assignments, notifications, and reports accurate even as people and roles change.

Note: This feature will be released progressively over the following two months.

What's New

Built Around How Teams Really Work

User Groups represent real teams: departments, field crews, project units, or executive groups. They’re centrally managed by superusers through a new User Groups administration area, where teams can be created, updated, and reused across the platform.

Each group can have one or more Responsible Persons to ensure accountability, and users can belong to multiple groups—making it easy to support matrix organizations and cross-department collaboration without compromise.

One Team, One Click — Everywhere It Matters

Once created, User Groups are available anywhere an Assignee or Responsible Person is used.

Tasks can be assigned to an entire team in a single action—whether during creation, reassignment, or within task chains. Issues and agreements now support group responsibility as well, automatically passing that responsibility down to related task chains when applicable.

The result? Faster setup, fewer errors, and workflows that stay intact even when team membership changes.

Clear Visibility, Smarter Insights

To help users stay on top of shared responsibilities, My Groups quick filters are now available in Tasks, Issues, and Agreements. With one click, users can see everything assigned to the teams they’re part of—no manual searching required.

Analytics reports also support filtering by User Groups, making it easier to analyze workloads, performance, and activity at a team level rather than just by individual users.

Communication That Reaches the Right People

User Groups are fully integrated into Borealis communication workflows.

Email notifications can be sent to a group’s Responsible Persons or to all group members, depending on the context. When notifications are triggered by an Assignee or Responsible Person field that contains a group, Borealis automatically notifies only the group’s Responsible Persons—keeping communication focused and relevant.

Scheduled analytics reports can also be sent to groups. When reports are marked as Personalized, each group member receives their own version based on their individual data permissions, ensuring the right insights reach the right people every time.

Key Benefits

• Efficiency: One-click assignment to entire teams

• Consistency: Assignments remain valid despite internal staff changes

• Scalability: Suitable for both small teams and large enterprises

• Error Reduction: Reduces the risk of missing recipients

• Reusability: The same groups are used across assignments, notifications, and reports

• Centralized Control: Group structure managed in one place by superusers

Consultation Process Enhancements — Closing the Loop from Concern to Commitment

Every meaningful consultation starts with listening—but its real value lies in what happens next. With this release, Borealis introduces significant enhancements to the Consultation Process, designed to clearly connect what stakeholders say, how organizations respond, and what they ultimately commit to deliver.

These improvements were born from real project experience, where teams needed stronger traceability between field conversations, internal decisions, and external commitments. The result is a consultation workflow that tells a complete story—one that stands up to scrutiny from communities, regulators, and senior leadership alike.

What's New

From Field Conversations to Clear Accountability

Consultations often begin with informal interactions: a concern raised during a meeting, a comment shared in passing, an issue observed in the field. With the new enhancements, these moments no longer live in isolation.

A dedicated Analysis section within Issues now anchors each concern to its origin—linking communications directly to the issue and documenting the measure adopted and the official response provided to the stakeholder. This creates a continuous thread from the first conversation to the organization’s response, ensuring nothing is lost along the way.

Closing Issues with Confidence—and Clarity

Resolving an issue is no longer just about marking it as closed. Before an issue can be completed, Borealis now asks teams to clearly define how it was addressed.

When closing an issue, users capture the adopted measures, the type of resolution, and the official message shared with the stakeholder. These details are carried forward from the analysis phase, reinforcing consistency and accountability. The outcome is a clear, auditable record of how each concern was handled—removing ambiguity and strengthening trust.

When a Concern Becomes a Commitment

Some issues require more than a response—they require a commitment.

With the new Commitment Integration, teams can now formally convert an issue into a commitment or link it to an existing one. This creates a visible and traceable bridge between stakeholder concerns and long-term actions, ensuring escalated issues are backed by concrete, trackable commitments.

Telling the Full Story

Strong consultation is not only about doing the right thing—it’s about being able to show it.

All consultation enhancements are fully reflected in Borealis reports and document templates. Official responses, measures adopted, resolution types, and linked commitments now appear in Word and PDF outputs, allowing teams to present a complete, transparent narrative to government authorities, executives, and external stakeholders—without manual rework.

Raising the Bar on Data Quality

To ensure consultation data is complete and reliable, administrators can require key fields to be completed before issues are closed. This structured approach improves data quality at the source, reducing gaps in reporting and making engagement insights easier to analyze and defend.

For teams working directly from engagement plans, optional shortcuts make it possible to capture analysis entries seamlessly during execution—keeping consultation tracking aligned from planning through delivery.

Key Benefits

• Reduced Ambiguity: Clear, formal links between communications, issues, and commitments

• Enhanced Transparency: Greater visibility into actions taken and responses shared

• Optimized Reporting: Stronger, traceable reports that tell a complete story

• Time Savings: Less back-and-forth thanks to structured, guided workflows

Note: To fully benefit from this workflow, the Issues module is required. If your organization relies on consultation workflows but does not currently use Issues, please contact your Account Manager to review your setup.

Ask Borealis AI v2.0 — Now It Talks Back

Ask Borealis AI has taken a major step forward. With v2.0, AI assistance in Borealis moves beyond one-off questions and becomes a real conversation.

Instead of asking, getting an answer, and starting over, users can now continue the dialogue—refining questions, exploring follow-ups, and keeping context intact until they reach exactly what they need. The experience feels natural, guided, and much closer to how people actually think and work.

Ask Borealis AI v2.0 keeps everything users already value—natural language questions, predefined prompts, favorites, and in-app feedback—while quietly improving the experience behind the scenes. No training required. Just ask, follow up, and keep going.

What's New

From Questions to Conversations

Ask Borealis AI v2.0 understands the flow of a discussion. After answering a question, it can suggest helpful next steps—inviting users to dig deeper, summarize insights, or focus on what matters most. Conversations stay connected, reducing friction and making preparation for meetings, reviews, and decisions faster and easier.

Smarter, More Relevant Answers

This new version also begins to factor in organizational and role context. Answers are no longer just accurate—they’re increasingly relevant.

Transparency You Can Trust

Every insight remains traceable. Source linking has been improved so users can easily jump back to the underlying communication records, reinforcing trust and making follow-up seamless.

Key Benefits

• Conversational Interaction: A natural, flowing way to explore insights

• Higher Relevance: Answers informed by organizational and user context

• Improved Transparency: Clear links back to source communications

• Stronger Adoption: AI that fits real workflows, not rigid queries

Microsoft 365 Integration — Beta

Email has become one of the main tools where stakeholder engagement happens—but capturing that activity shouldn’t be extra work. With the new Microsoft 365 integration, Borealis takes a major step toward making stakeholder communications automatic, complete, and invisible.

Instead of relying solely on manual uploads or the Outlook add-in, emails and meetings can now flow directly into Borealis—ensuring nothing is missed, while still giving organizations full control over what gets synchronized.

What's New

From Manual Uploads to Seamless Capture

For many teams, logging emails into Borealis has been a daily chore—and an easy step to forget. With this integration, relevant emails sent or received through Microsoft 365 are automatically synchronized into Borealis, creating a complete and reliable communication history without extra effort from users.

Calendar meetings are also captured, including participants and meeting details, turning Outlook activity into structured engagement records.

Built for Control, Compliance, and Trust

Automation doesn’t mean loss of control. Users and administrators can define exactly what should and should not sync using allow and block lists, timeframe selection, and folder-based controls. Sensitive or irrelevant emails can be excluded entirely, while only approved domains or addresses are allowed to create new stakeholders.

This ensures teams benefit from automation without compromising confidentiality or regulatory requirements—especially in sensitive or regulated environments.

Smarter Stakeholder Records, Stronger Reporting

By consistently capturing communications, Borealis dramatically improves data completeness. Stakeholder histories are richer, reports are more reliable, and users gain clearer visibility into engagement activity across teams and regions.

What was once dependent on individual habits is now systematic—and trustworthy.

Designed to Scale, Ready for What’s Next

The Microsoft 365 integration lays the groundwork for future innovation. With communications reliably flowing into Borealis, the platform is prepared for upcoming enhancements such as AI-driven categorization, smart tagging, and predictive insights.

This is not just an integration—it’s a foundation for smarter engagement management.

Key Benefits

• Major time savings by eliminating manual email upload.

• Improved data completeness with consistent communication capture

• Higher adoption through a seamless, low-friction experience

• Stronger stakeholder management with reliable engagement histories

Other Improvements

Alongside the major feature releases, this update includes a wide range of targeted improvements across Borealis. These enhancements focus on data quality, reporting clarity, usability, access control, and automation—helping teams work more efficiently while maintaining accuracy and compliance.

Outlook Add-in & Email Integration

• Relationship Manager Auto-Assignment (Configurable): A new option allows organizations to disable the automatic assignment of a Relationship Manager when stakeholders are created via the Outlook add-in. This prevents unintended assignments and can be activated on request.

• Confidential Sync Option: Teams can now choose to remove email or meeting content before syncing to Borealis. When enabled, only metadata (date, time, title, attendees) is saved—supporting confidentiality while still recording engagement activity.

Smart Communications

• Shared Email Support: Smart Communications now support multiple stakeholders sharing the same email address. Emails are sent once per address when no personalization is used, or once per stakeholder when replacement tags are applied, with clear warnings to prevent duplicates and ensure accurate record-keeping.

• Smart Communications – Reminders: Improved reminder workflows by identifying recipients who have replied and enabling reminders to target only non-respondents, with support for both standard and opt-out lists (including automatic deactivation of respondents for opt-out communications).

• Reply Status Indicators: New reply status indicators are available in both the Communications and Recipients sections. When duplicating messages, users can now choose to copy only recipients who have not responded.

Reporting & Analytics

• Configurable Project Colors: Projects can now be assigned custom colors, ensuring consistent and standardized visuals across reports, legends, and widgets.

• Assessment Matrix Export: Assessment matrices can now be exported to PNG format, aligning them with other analytics widgets.

• New System Report Filters: We’ve added two powerful new filtering options to help you analyze your data with greater precision and clarity.

  • Categorization (Stakeholder)
    You can now filter system reports by Stakeholder Categorization, allowing you to quickly segment report results based on stakeholder groups. This makes it easier to focus on the stakeholders most relevant to your analysis.

  • Department (Staff)
    A new Department (Staff) filter has been introduced, enabling you to narrow report data by staff department. This helps improve visibility into departmental performance, workloads, and related insights.

• Temporary Filters for table widgets: For quick exploration, you can now apply temporary filters to a table widget in a report when in view mode. These are now clearly marked as unsaved and will reset when the page is refreshed, helping you experiment without affecting your reporting setup.

Corporate View Add-On

• Configurable Site Colors: Sites can now be assigned custom colors, enabling consistent visual comparison across reports and dashboards at the corporate level.

• Restricted Site Visibility: Corporate users can now be limited to viewing only the sites they are assigned to, without visibility across all projects.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Commitments – Rich Text Description: The Description field in Commitments now supports rich text formatting, aligned with Communications for improved clarity and presentation.

• Issues – Process Duration (Business Days): A new field captures process duration in business days, aligned with the same logic already used in Grievances.

Assessment Programs

• Improved Project Linking Usability: When more than 30 projects are linked to an assessment program, a dedicated grid is now displayed—making it easier to view, add, and remove project links.

• Grievance Portal – Postal Code Mapping: Postal codes submitted through the Grievance Portal are now mapped to grievance addresses. This enables accurate geocoding and visualization of grievances on maps, supporting spatial analysis and location-based reporting.

Tasks & Task Chains

• Recurring Tasks: Additional assignees are now automatically carried over when new recurring tasks are created.

• Task Chains – Mandatory Steps: Steps within a task chain can now be tagged as mandatory, preventing tasks from being marked as unfinished if required steps are incomplete.

• New Importers: New importers for Tasks and Task Chains are now available, simplifying bulk creation and updates for high-volume workflows.

Social Investment

• Community Contributions – Status Clarifications: Requested Status values in the request creation form have been updated for clarity.

• New Address Field: A new Address field has been added to the Community Contributions form and can be enabled via field configuration.

• Online Contribution Requests – Organization Duplicate Detection: Duplicate detection has been improved when submitting requests via the portal. Existing organizations with matching names are now reused automatically, reducing duplicate records and improving data consistency.

Land Management

• Agreement Templates: You can now create and use templates for Agreements to standardize structure and content, improving consistency, and reducing manual work when creating new agreements.

• Company Assets in Agreements: A new Company Assets section is now available in Agreements, allowing agreements to be linked directly to one or more company assets. This supports managing projects via company assets instead of engagement plans, improves visibility of asset–agreement relationships, and enables linking through add/edit, import, analytics, and batch actions (where applicable).

• New Asset Section (Parcels): A new Assets section is now available on Parcels, allowing teams to record impacted assets with type, description, quantity, unit, and value. The section supports import, uses configurable asset types, and is available in field configuration but disabled by default.

• Land Management API Enhancements: Two new fields are available in the Agreements endpoint:

  • baseStakeholderIdsInd (linked individuals)

  • baseStakeholderIdsOrg (linked organizations)

• Titleholder Excel Import: The Titleholder import template now supports email and phone number fields.

• Parcel Geometry Accuracy: When parcels are deactivated or transitioned to another property, their geometry is now correctly removed from maps and APIs—ensuring spatial data remains accurate.

• Condition Type Data Dictionaries: Condition Types have been split into separate lists for Parcels and Agreements, improving clarity and configuration control.

• Agreements - Multi-Point Geometry Support: Agreements using Point geometry can now include multiple points, allowing a single agreement to apply to multiple locations.

General Configuration and Usability

• New User Profile: SE – Communications – Data Entry: A new profile allows users to create and view communications (without delete permissions) and to create and edit stakeholders, while restricting access to issues, engagement plans, and assessment programs.

• Copy Link Shortcut: A new “Copy Link” icon is available in forms and grids, allowing users to quickly copy URLs for documents of type Link.

• Excel Updater Templates: Updater templates are now available for additional modules, allowing bulk updates directly from Excel. This enhancement extends existing updaters (Individuals, Organizations, Parcels, Agreements) to Engagement Plans, Communications, and Tasks, improving efficiency for large-scale data maintenance.