‘Tis the Season for Reflection

It’s that time of year again when the twinkle of fairy lights brightens the dark nights, the smell of freshly baked mince pies is like a warm hug on a cold day, and you spend the next three weeks pulling pine needles out of your socks!

Yes, it’s time for the perennial marketing dictum that is the end-of-year retrospective. Grab your favourite spiced drink and a handful of candy canes while we travel back through the last twelve months and catch a glimpse of what lies ahead in 2026. Kind of like A Christmas Carol only with more tech and less singing.

Key Features For 2025

Our developers pulled something rather special out of the bag this year. While most of us were trying to find creative ways to use the left over turkey, the team kicked off 2025 by making a start on the 140 feature requests they would go on to receive throughout the year.

Our platform wouldn’t be what it is today without feedback from our customers. Often this insight results in small changes that boost productivity, but every now and then, those conversations spark an idea that turns into something much bigger (just like the Christmas food shopping!).

In case you missed it, I’ve picked out 4 of the biggest feature releases that have brought most benefit to our clients.

New Email Builder

A fully visual, drag-and-drop editor with real-time previews and ManagementStudio keyword integration.

Email is the cornerstone of effective change within enterprise transformation programmes and BAU.  The first iteration of our email editor removed the need for communication and project teams to juggle multiple disjointed tools to build their campaigns.  No more fragmented workflow, version drift, or inconsistent branding.

But we wanted to take this a step further and enable clients to create rich, engaging emails without the need to dive into code.  ManagementStudio’s new email builder makes it easier for teams to craft beautiful emails that drives action:

• Email Wrappers: Common design elements – like headers, footers, fonts, and colours – now live in wrappers to improve brand consistency, reduce creation time, and eliminate context switching.
• Instant Browser Preview: One-click live rendering lets administrators quickly review the design before sending to end-users.
• Final-output Email Check: Designers get to see the output in their email client to show exactly how the message will appear in inboxes, catching Outlook rendering quirks early.
• Keyword Support: Personalised email improves open and click-through rates, and drives overall engagement. The email builder enables relevant information to be added at the right time with just one click!

The new builder dramatically reduces the time to prepare your email campaign, ensures brand consistency across all comms, and enables everyone on the project team to create polished, data-driven emails without leaving the platform.

New Connectors

Break through the data wall with new connectors that extend insights for transformation and service delivery.

Modern transformation programmes often stumble when trying to leverage data silos. It’s often some of the most valuable information we’ll use and typically the most challenging to access. Nonetheless, we helped our customers workaround these limitations by complementing our first-generation connectors with scripts and importers. This removed the need to manually duplicate data from isolated and disparate sources and gave project teams more time for analysis and executing strategy.

Our next generation of connectors take data integration to new heights. We’ve created new, repeatable ways for our customers to break through data silos in their transformation programme, and carry those benefits and insights through into daily service delivery and BAU:

• Integration with mainstream IT Service Management platforms 1E, ServiceNow, and Flexera SNOW.
• Universal connectors to simplify imports from SQL sources and flat files.
• REST API support to ingest information from SaaS platforms, web sources, or even other projects in ManagementStudio!

By eliminating the need for bespoke data pipelines, ManagementStudio gives teams instant visibility across all assets, resulting in faster data-driven decision making, fewer missed dependencies, and a reduction in the time it takes to move from data collection to actionable insight.

The Plugin Repository

Pre-packaged plugins that add whole new workflows with a single click.

Earlier this year, we introduced the ManagementStudio story wheel as a way to illustrate some of the ways that our platform has helped our clients. And then we thought, why not create a way to take these ideas and turn them into something that can easily be installed, without the time and experimentation that comes with building the concepts in the wheel?

So, we did!

The plugins bring together multiple components – like automation, surveys, and reports – into a portable, easy to install package that instantly creates new management scenarios. All you need to do is decide how you’ll use them in your organisation!

We launched the Plugin Repository at our Annual Meet-up in October with 4 brand new management scenarios ready to go and many more in the pipeline:

• Application Owner Engagement Process: Automate the collection of up-to-date information from Application Owners, helping verify key details like licence status, compliance, and upgrade readiness.
• Issue Reporting System: Provides a dedicated, transparent channel to report and track issues during or after a migration, ensuring problems are acknowledged and addressed promptly.
• Migration Satisfaction Survey: Helps IT teams gather structured user feedback after a migration or transformation, providing valuable insights into user experience, challenges, and areas for improvement.
• Estate Overview Web Dashboard: Combines data from multiple sources to provide a unique perspective of the current application, device, and user landscape across the IT estate.

The ManagementStudio Plugin Repository means that project teams spend less time creating bespoke functionality and more time delivering outcomes. And the best part – they’re completely free to all current subscribers or perpetual licenses with an active support contract.

Updates to ACE:AI

Reduce time to deployment with real-world insights that underpin your application management strategy.

Application sprawl in the estate can be an on-going challenge and left unchecked, it often lengthens the time to deliver transformation programmes, increases your software licensing liability, and brings unnecessary complexity to application management in BAU. This is why we created the Asset Confidence Engine (ACE:AI).

Since it’s launch 3 years ago, ACE:AI has helped customers to collectively make decisions on 95,000 applications. We took a process that would have taken a team of people weeks or months to complete and turned it into something that can be wrapped up in just a few days. The latest round of updates to ACE:AI have enabled migration teams to reduce Windows rollouts and empowered service delivery teams to proactively manage applications in BAU:

• Windows-version Awareness: Instantly see the Windows builds that other customers have run the application on to unlock Windows 11 readiness, reducing the testing window.
• Prioritise Updates: Quickly identify applications that have fallen behind the upgrade cycle to maintain a more secure portfolio.
• Faster Rationalisation: New rationalisation rules bring greater control, granularity, and automation enabling application teams to process applications quicker.

The new insights into how applications are used within our customer community enables a ‘migration by exception’ approach to Windows upgrades; it reduces the testing application window and often eliminating it altogether. ACE:AI is invaluable for identifying low-value or redundant software, and combined with Application Owner Engagement Process plugin, drives license optimisations and a leaner, more secure application portfolio.

What Does the Future Hold?

2025 was a year that saw impressive rates of development from the team. They’ve implemented customer requests, introduced countless changes that improve day-to-day productivity, and delivered some of the biggest value features that we’ve seen for a while. Well, since last year… 😉

But there’s still much more to come in 2026.

If you attended our event in October, you’ll have already heard about the some of the usability features we have planned, new ways to communicate with stakeholders and colleagues, how we think about taxonomy in a project, and the biggest change to workflow since we created ManagementStudio.

And if you weren’t at the event, we’ve got you covered. I’ll be writing another blog soon about the big-ticket items on the 2026 roadmap.

Until next time,

Matt.