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Understand how to connect to CMS’ primary whiteboarding tool

Table of Contents

CMS Access

Mural (commonly stylized as MURAL) is a collaborative whiteboarding tool. You can use it to run workshops, brainstorming sessions, user research sessions, and card sorting activities. It is CMS’ primary whiteboarding tool, but only CMS employees can have Mural accounts. This means you must ask a CMS employee (usually your product owner) to create public Mural boards for your team. As a contractor, you’ll only have viewer status on Mural boards and won’t have access to some features.

CMS Mural Slack Channel

For more help with Mural, you can use the Mural Support channel on CMS Slack:

• #mural_support

Mural Tips and Tricks

Below are some tips and tricks when it comes to using Mural.

Use Areas to Separate Content

Mural has something called “areas” that can be used to separate content. This is useful for keeping things organized. To create an area:

1. Click the grid icon in the top left sidebar to open the Frameworks panel.

2. From the layouts tab, click and drag Freeform area over to the board. You can also choose a Grid area to have even more organized content.

   

   A screenshot of the layouts tab in the Frameworks panel in Mural where you can find areas to add to your board.

Use Groups To Consolidate Content

Similar to Figma, Mural has groups that can be used to organize content. To create a group:

1. Select the content that you want to organize.
2. Right-click the content and in the right-click menu, choose Group.

A screenshot of the right-click menu in Mural, where you can choose Group to organize content.

Use Grids To Organize Content