We’ve just rolled out a powerful upgrade that makes live training more engaging, collaborative, and effortless for everyone in the virtual classroom.

Introducing Integrated Comms — a built-in voice, video, and chat solution, purpose-built for virtual instructor-led training (VILT).
No more juggling external tools. Everything happens inside Heropa.

Why this matters

Until now, running a live session meant switching between different platforms to screen share, chat, or move between views.

With Integrated Comms, it’s all built-in — making sessions smoother, more interactive, and easier to manage.

✅ No more context-switching
✅ Keep everyone in sync inside the Heropa platform

What’s new?

🗣️ Built-in voice, video, and chat for seamless live collaboration

👀 “Follow the Host” mode — participants automatically track the instructor’s view as they:

• Switch between their own VM and shared desktop or window
• Share a participant’s VM with the class to highlight great work or troubleshoot live

💻 Everything happens inside Heropa — no external apps needed

Whether you’re running a hands-on lab, delivering complex software training, or troubleshooting live with participants, Integrated Comms keeps everyone connected and focused.

Ready to try it?

Reach out to the Heropa support team to enable Integrated Comms for your events.

👉 Learn more: See our support article.

👋 Hi from the Heropa team!

We’ve just released a powerful new feature that gives you greater control over training delivery — while giving your students more time and flexibility to learn.

Introducing Active Time Limit, a smarter way to deliver hands-on labs for both classroom and on-demand training. With Active Time Limit, students enjoy flexibility, and you keep training delivery costs predictable and under control.

The challenge

Traditionally, giving students 30 days of lab access meant giving them unlimited usage during that time. This offered flexibility — but also meant unexpectedly high training delivery costs, even if a student only needed a few hours.

The typical workaround? Shorter access windows. But that often limited flexibility and added pressure on learners.

The solution: Active Time Limit

With Active Time Limit, you control how much time students actively spend in the lab workspace — not just how long it’s available.

✅ Example: Give students 30 days of access, but cap usage to 5 hours of actual lab time.
✅ Flexible pacing: Students can pause and resume learning when it suits them.
✅ Cost control: You set the maximum usage time, so lab costs stay predictable — even with longer access windows.  

How it works

You can apply an Active Time Limit in two ways, depending on how you deliver training:

🖥️ On-demand labs and courses
Set an Active Time Limit within your policies — just like max duration or idle timeout. Define it at the course or environment level, allowing students to access their lab over an extended window (e.g. 30 days) while only consuming a set number of active hours (e.g. 5 hours).

🎓 Events and virtual classrooms
Enable Active Time Limit at the event level to cap the time spent in the workspace during instructor-led training.

Note: If you schedule event environments to automatically start at the start of class, and the user does not access the workspace (absent or direct RDP to the VM), Active Time is not consumed but VMs are still running. We recommend that you choose your preferred method based on your requirements.  

Example: Run a 3-day training course across 5 days. Students get up to 3 × 8-hour days of Active Time Limit and can choose which days to join, while instructors provide real-time support.

💡 The result: You keep costs predictable. Students get the freedom to learn on their own terms.

✅ Active Time Limit is available now for both Courses and Events.
It’s easy to configure — Learn how to set an Active Time Limit.

👋 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/.

👋 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! 

Hi friends!  

We’ve been hard at work here at Heropa, and we’re pleased to announce some improvements to our Events module. Our goal is to make managing Events easier for event administrators and instructors, and these updates are a great step in that direction.

Changes to Event scheduling

The first big piece of news, is a new way to manage event schedules. When creating an event, we've removed the need to associate an event with a policy. Instead, an event schedule can be set for the event. 2 types of schedules can be created: 

1. Daily schedule: Allows for the bulk creation of consecutive days with the same daily schedule - ie the same start and end times each day. Weekends can be optionally excluded.
2. Custom schedule: Allows for the creation of non-consecutive days, or days with different schedules.  

We’ve also tidied up the Create new event flow so that Scheduling is done in the second step, called 'Schedule'. All other customizable options are managed in the third step, called 'Options'. 

For more information, see: Creating an event.

This update also includes more flexible editing to Event schedules after the event has been created, or the event has started. It's now easy to: 

• Change the start / end time on any given day (thus adding or removing time to a daily schedule)
• Add additional days to a pre-existing schedule 

For more information, see: Running an event.

Enhanced event seat allocation

We've also made it easier to manage the allocation of event seats. In an event, select 'Manage seats' to see the following:

1. Add seats to an event
2. Add users to an event, including new users
3. Import users via a csv file

For more information, see: Managing event participants.

We’re excited to offer these new ways to manage events, and we’re sure that you will love the improvements. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re always looking for ways to improve Heropa, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.