The Heropa team has been super busy of late. Here's some of the highlights we've been working on over the last little while:

✨ New features

• VM backups for AWS environments: You can now back up and restore environment VMs hosted in AWS. This enables customers to create safe rollback points, restore environments in place, or generate new VM images from backups—offering greater flexibility and protection for critical environments. Learn more here.
• Webhook notifications: You can now configure webhook notifications to receive real-time updates when key events occur within your Heropa tenancy. This enables better integration with external systems and improved visibility across workflows. Learn more here.
• Protected environments – override capability: Users can now override protection on a protected environment when making simple changes. A confirmation modal will warn users that their actions may impact the environment, and all overrides are logged in the audit trail. This allows administrators to make necessary adjustments without first removing protection—while still maintaining traceability and accountability. Learn more here.
• Default environment logo: Companies can now set a default logo for all course and event environments. This logo will appear in students’ MyLabs view, providing a more branded and consistent experience across all environments. Learn more here.

🌱 Enhancements

• Templates: Added deletion protection for templates that are in use by courses or events, preventing accidental removal of templates currently in use.
• Event classroom: A confirmation modal is now shown when selecting View workspace, helping prevent accidentally disconnecting students who are actively using their environment. 
• Event classroom: We have added a Hide option to the classroom tile dropdown to make it easier to hide event seats that you no longer want to see. 
• Event classroom: The View Workspace button has been moved into the tile dropdown to reduce the risk of instructors accidentally interrupting students actively using their environments. We’ve also reorganized the tile dropdown menu—options are now context-specific based on user and environment statuses, and the order has been adjusted for greater consistency and clarity. Learn more about all our classroom updates here.
• Protected environments: Destructive actions such as Reset Environment, Destroy Environment, and Delete VM are no longer available for protected environments. This ensures important environments remain safe from accidental changes or deletions. Learn more here.
• SSO: Company administrators can now configure a Logout URL for SSO users. When set, users will be logged out of their SSO session with the identity provider upon logging out of Heropa. This is an optional field and will only be used if configured.

🔧 Bugfixes

• Event templates: Fixed a missing validation when adding a template to an event where the selected credential pool had no credential sets available.
• Event classroom: An issue where newly provisioned student environments were not appearing in the classroom view without refreshing the page has been fixed.
• User imports: Column headings in the User import CSV were case sensitive. Headings are now treated in a case-insensitive manner for smoother imports.
• Credentials: An issue where updates to credential sets were not immediately reflected in the credentials list without refreshing the page has been fixed.
• Events: Deleting participants as part of an event deletion will no longer remove users who have a role assigned. Only users without a role will be deleted.

Note: The v7.67.0 release will be rolled out to customer environments over the coming week.

👋 Hello from the Heropa team! We’ve made some changes to the Event Classroom UI to improve the host and instructor experience—and to help avoid accidentally interrupting participants who are actively working in their environments.

What’s new in the event classroom

• "View Workspace" button moved to the dropdown: To reduce confusion and avoid unintentional disconnections, the View Workspace option that was previously available when hovering on a participant tile has been moved to inside the tile dropdown menu—away from the primary action area. View workspace takes control of the workspace being viewed - this is not normally intention of the host and as such removing it as the default hover option will help to avoid user disconnection.
• View Workspace confirmation: When selecting View Workspace, you’ll now see a confirmation modal to help prevent accidentally taking over a student’s session. Again, this was implemented to protect active users.
• Context-aware dropdown actions: The tile dropdown now shows actions based on the user and environment status, and we’ve reordered the options for improved clarity and consistency.
• New Hide option: We’ve added a quick Hide option to the tile dropdown so you can easily remove seats from view without needing to adjust visibility settings separately.

We hope these improvements help you manage your sessions more confidently. As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

👋 Hello from the Heropa team! We’re excited to share a powerful new feature that gives you more control and peace of mind when managing your AWS-based environments.

Introducing VM Backups for AWS Environments

Whether you’re experimenting with changes, preparing for a demo, or working with a valuable environment, it’s helpful to have a way to roll back if something doesn’t go to plan. Heropa’s new VM backups feature allows you to create on-demand snapshots of individual VMs, giving you a reliable way to restore to a known good state.

With this update, you can:

• Back up individual VMs on demand
• Restore a VM in place from a backup
• Create a new VM image from a backup for testing or template creation
• View and manage all VM backups in the new environment Backups tab

This means you can confidently test updates or make changes knowing you can easily roll back if needed. It’s also a great way to preserve critical VM states or clone VMs into new environments for validation.

Here’s a peek at what’s new:

• A new row action on environment VMs to create a new backup
• A Backups tab in your environment with backup details, status, and actions
• New options to backup, delete, restore, or create a VM image from backups

We hope this feature gives you more flexibility and confidence when working with important environments. As always, we’d love your feedback—reach out if you have any questions or suggestions!

👋 Hey from the Heropa team! We’ve just rolled out something that opens up a lot of possibilities for integration and automation.

Introducing Webhook Notifications

Ever wanted to be instantly notified when something important happens in your Heropa tenancy? Or maybe you’d like to trigger actions in another system when user enrolls in one of your courses, a new event is scheduled, or an environment needs updating?

You can now configure webhook notifications to receive real-time POST requests whenever specific events occur in Heropa.

This makes it easier to:

• Automatically update external systems when users or environments change
• Trigger notifications, workflows, or alerts in tools like Slack, Teams, or Zapier
• Maintain tighter integration between Heropa and your existing processes

Each webhook can be configured with:

• A custom endpoint URL
• A list of events you want to subscribe to
• JSON payloads containing event-specific details

Whether you want to power dashboards, automate manual tasks, or log activity in an external system—webhooks make it possible.

We’re excited to see what you build with this new capability. Let us know how you use it—or if there are more event types you’d like to see supported!

👋 Hello from the Heropa team! Today we’re releasing a powerful new feature that gives you more flexibility when managing protected environments—while keeping them safe from destructive actions.

Override protection when you need to make changes

Protected environments are designed to safeguard critical resources from accidental changes or deletion. But what if you just need to tweak a setting or make a small update—without removing protection entirely?

You can now override protection on a protected environment, allowing you to make non-destructive changes while preserving guardrails around high-value environments.

Here’s how it works:

• When you attempt to modify a protected environment, a confirmation modal will now appear with a new “Override protection” option
• Selecting this will trigger a second confirmation, ensuring the action is intentional
• Each override is recorded in the audit log, environment history, and user history for traceability

Additional safety improvements

To further protect critical environments, we’ve removed destructive actions from protected environments:

• Destroy Environment and Reset Environment are no longer available in the action menus
• You can no longer delete or protect individual VMs within a protected environment

These changes help ensure that only intentional, safe updates are made—keeping your environments secure and your audit trail complete.

We hope this update gives you a better balance of flexibility and control. Let us know what you think—or if there’s anything else you’d like to see added!

👋 Hey from the Heropa team! We’ve just added a small but mighty update that gives your environments a more polished and branded feel—automatically.

Set a default logo for environments in MyLabs

You can now upload a default logo that will be shown for course and event environments in the student MyLabs view. This new setting helps ensure your environments always reflect your company’s branding, even if a specific logo isn’t added during course or event setup.

Here’s what’s new:

• In Administration → Settings → Branding, you’ll see a new option: Default MyLabs logo for environments
• Click on the logo shown to open the image selector and upload or replace your default logo
• Your selected logo is automatically applied to all newly created courses and event environments
• You can still set different logos for individual courses when needed

By setting a default, you can deliver a consistent, professional visual experience to your students—without any extra effort from your course or event creators.

📚 For more information, see: Configuring settings.

We hope this makes it easier to keep your training environment looking and feeling like an extension of your brand. Let us know how it’s working for you!

Hi everyone! We have some great news! Heropa has been audited and has re-certified to one of the most reputable accreditations for security standards in the world: ISO 27001:2022! 🔐 

At Heropa, we care about your data security and privacy. We already do lots to keep your data safe and our interactions secure, but we wanted to give you even more peace of mind. 

Want to know more? Take a look at our Trust Center at https://trust.heropa.com/.

Here at Heropa we've been busy bees over the last little while! 🐝 Here's an update outlining what's in our latest release. We also have lots of other exciting things we're working on, which we'll share with you soon. If you'd like to receive these updates via email, please subscribe!

✨ Brand new    

• Configure your Heropa tenancy to not require email addresses from end users: New capability that help meets privacy compliance by providing a way for end users to use Heropa without us storing their email address. Learn more about it here.
• Event and workspace defaults: Admins can now configure default settings for Events and the workspace at a tenancy level. See: Configuring settings.
• Event history: It's now possible to view a detailed audit log of modifications made to an event, via the new History tab. See: Understanding event history.

🌱 Enhancements

• Events - Open workspaces column: The Events List page contains a new column to show the number of open workspaces in each event. This will help Administrators easily identify in progress events.
• Events - Reboot VMs in bulk: A bulk action is now available on an event’s Environments tab, to reboot VMs in bulk during an event. See: Running an event.
• Email templates: Individual email templates can now be enabled / disabled, giving you more control over email communications with users. See: Managing email templates.
• Deleting users: When deleting a user with a role, if that user owns any objects (eg. templates, VM images, etc), a prompt to transfer their ownership is now shown, and object ownership must be transferred before they can be deleted. 
• User invite URL: Should invited users not receive their email to register an account, you can now access their Invite URL containing their unique access token from the Users List page, and share it with them to allow them to complete their registration. See: Adding users.
• Templates List last modified: A new column has been added to the Templates List page showing when each template was last modified.
• Storage usage calculations: Previously, the storage usage calculation for environments was showing an hourly value in environment lists. This now shows a monthly value, allowing you to more easily determine how environments are consuming storage.
• Compatibility checks by region: For companies with >1 region you can now specify the region to run the test when using the test URL, by adding the region shortcode to the end of the URL eg. company.heropa.com/test/regionshortcode. The region shortcode is based on the cloud provider’s code for that region.
• API: We’ve improved our API interactions with cloud providers, resulting in fewer calls and improving the utilization against published cloud provider rate limits.  

🔧 Bugfixes

• Events: Seats deleted and then re-created were creating duplicate seats. This has now been fixed.
• Users - Bulk delete: A bug that was incorrectly deleting users with a role has now been fixed. Only users without a role can be deleted via bulk delete.
• Reports: Reporting on when an environment was last accessed is now showing correctly in the Last Access column.
• API: An issue where Company defaults for Events were not being respected for events created via the API has been fixed. 

👋 Hi from the Heropa team! We're pleased to let you know about some new capability on the platform.. Read on! 👀   

Some of our customers have been asking about whether end users can use Heropa without us requiring or storing their email address. Given the importance of data protection, this makes complete sense! 

At a Heropa tenancy level, it's now possible for Administrators to configure whether email addresses are required for end users. If the 'Show email addresses' configuration is switched off in Administration / Settings, then users can:

• Be invited into Heropa 
• Create an account on Heropa 
• Be enrolled in a course 
• Be assigned event seats 

.. all without requiring an email address.   

How does it work? 

When adding a new user to Heropa, an Email address field is optionally available. If completed, they will receive the invitation to join Heropa via email. The email address is retained until the user activates their account. This allows the invitation to be re-sent if necessary. Once they create and activate their account, their email address is deleted.

The same applies if an end user is enrolled in a course or invited to an event via their email address. 

Please note: 

• Enabling this feature does not prevent your internal user accounts from having email addresses to receive administrator notifications from Heropa. 
• Access links can still be used to provide end users access to courses and events without an email address.

For more information, see: Configuring settings, and Adding users.

We look forward to your feedback! 

👋 Hello from us here at Heropa! Today we've got some exciting news to share with you. 

For some time now, it’s been possible to copy templates between regions, creating a new independent template in the new region, based on the original. With this method, changes made to a template in one region do not impact the template in the region it was copied to.

While this has proven to be very useful, we’ve heard from you that it would be great if we could also make the same template available in multiple regions. 

Introducing Multi-region templates

It's now possible to make a single template available in multiple regions. This initiates the creation of VM image replicas in that region. The template and any of its regions can then be selected when creating a course, environment or event. Being a single template, any changes made to it are instantly available in all regions where that template exists. 

We hope this new capability can help streamline your work and make things easier for you. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch!