2026-10-28

In the two days since our last note, we shipped to production 11 times, so we're bringing this note forward. Grouping reaches Manage Items, My Work and the Service Desk inbox, every items table gets a Progress column, the Gantt table catches up with the Items table, and specs now lead straight to the work that builds them. Here are the highlights!

🗂 Group your items lists

Last week boards learned to group. Now Manage Items, My Work and the Service Desk inbox can too. Pick a field in the new Group by control beside the search box: Status, Team, Assignee, Persona, Priority, Item Type, Color, Labels, Parent or Workstream. Each heading shows a count and totals, and your grouping is saved with your view.

For most fields, drag a row, or every selected row, into another group to change that field. Grouped by Status, a row only lands in a status it is allowed to hold. Groups appear in a natural order, on boards too: priorities by rank, statuses from not started to done, everything else A to Z, with None last.

My Work is now Manage Items, limited to you. It has the full toolbar, Group by included, and opens on your open items; switch off Open only to see finished ones too. The Watching options are gone: to follow items you watch, save a Watchers filter as a view on Manage Items.

📚 Finding and filtering items · My Work

🟢 A Progress column for quick status updates

Every items table now has a Progress column, so you can see and update where work stands without opening each item. The percentage sits over a fill that runs from red at 0%, through yellow, to green at 100%, and a small pencil marks a value someone set by hand. Parent items roll up their children, just as they do on the Gantt.

Click the cell, or press Enter on it, to open the redesigned Progress window: a ring with the overall percentage, a bar for each measure your organization tracks (items, points or time), and a switch to set progress by hand.

📊 A Gantt table that works like the Items table

The table beside every Gantt chart now uses the Items table's own cells, so titles, dates, boards and relationships look and behave the same in both places, and edits made elsewhere appear at once.

• Choose your columns on a roadmap's Gantt from Options → Table columns: show, hide and drag to reorder, including a new Assignee column. Resize by dragging a header edge. Your choices are saved with the view.
• Progress at a glance: the Gantt's Progress column shows the same red-to-green fill as the items tables, and opens the same Progress window.
• Clearer bulk edits: editing a ticked row changes every ticked row, and the editor names them. Editing a row that isn't ticked changes only that row.
• Safer scenarios: while one is recording, Progress, Cycle / Board, Relationships and Assignee are read-only, so a what-if can't change real items by accident.

📚 Navigating the table · Gantt toolbar · Scenario planning

📝 From spec to work items

Knowledge Base specs now connect to the work that builds them.

• A spec's new Work items panel links existing items, and each item's drawer lists its Specs. Clients never see these links.
• Create work items turns up to 20 titles into items at once, each linked to the spec, using the work type its stage names. Move a spec into such a stage and DevStride offers to do it for you.
• A new automation trigger, Spec Reached a Stage, can create linked items, notify people or call a webhook.
• A No work items filter shows which specs have nothing built yet.

Creating items from a spec needs permission to create both articles and items; turning on the automation needs Manage all KB articles. Connected AI assistants can do all of this through the DevStride MCP.

📚 Specs and work items · Spec stages · MCP tool reference

🎧 Your own email domain, and a redesigned portal

Send Service Desk email from your own domain, such as support@yourcompany.com, instead of the shared DevStride address. Anyone with the Manage Service Desk Settings permission sets it up:

1. In Settings → Service Desk → Sending Domains, add your domain and publish the DNS records shown.
2. Forward that mailbox to your channel address.
3. Once the domain reads Verified, pick the new From address on Channel Addresses and save.
4. Open the address again and click Send test.

Email switches over when the test arrives, and replies still thread onto the same ticket.

A redesigned customer portal. Clients land on a Home page that leads with what is waiting on them, such as spec changes to approve and requests awaiting their reply, then their specs, newest requests and a help-center search. A side menu and a light/dark switch complete the new look. Mark a Knowledge Base category This category holds specs and its articles get their own Specs page in the portal.

📚 Sending from your own domain · Customer Support Portal

✨ And plenty more

• Jump to any item: type a number such as I14583 or F42 in the header search and press Enter.
• Assign yourself: click Me beside Assigned To in the item drawer, or press M in the Choose Assignee window.
• Map Value's item badge can show any field, custom fields included, from Options → Item Indicator.
• Your organizations, your order: drag them into place on My Account → Organizations.
• Microsoft Teams connects in a Microsoft organization that has never approved DevStride, with one approval screen.
• Fixes you'll feel: the priority picker lists only the priorities for the item's type, the Service Desk inbox shows a Toolbar button and search while its toolbar is collapsed, template exports include descriptions again, custom automation emails without a description link their item instead of reading "undefined", and the AI Assistant reads GitHub code much faster on large GitHub installations.

📚 Keyboard shortcuts · Using the Map · My Account · Microsoft Teams