We’re excited to announce powerful new features and improvements designed to give you more flexibility, control, and visibility in your platform experience. This release includes integrated communications for Events, flexible time-based environment access, the ability to switch templates and regions mid-session, and several UI and usability enhancements.

✨ New features

• Integrated comms for Events: Built-in voice, video, and chat are now available directly in the Event classroom. Hosts can share their screen, individual apps—or even a participant’s VM—with the entire class. Participants can also follow the host’s view changes in real-time, making it easier to guide students through complex workflows. Learn more here.
• Limit access using Active time: Set a time limit on how long students can actively use their environment—while keeping their access window open for a longer period. Great for controlling costs while offering flexibility. Learn more here. 
• Change template or region of a running environment: Need to switch a running environment to a different template or region? Now you can—without restarting from scratch.
• Customizable “Access currently disabled” screens: The workspace view now shows different screens depending on whether an event hasn’t started, has ended, or is outside class hours. Customize these messages via the Language module.
• New notifications for changes to events:
  • Event ending soon notification: Warn users when an event is nearing its end, with configurable lead time and recipient settings. Admins can define default notification behaviors per event.
  • Event cancellation notification: Send automatic alerts to hosts and participants when an event is cancelled before it starts—so no one shows up unnecessarily.

🌱 Enhancements

• Event Classroom icons for Direct RDP: Classroom tiles now display an icon to easily identify students using Direct RDP versus browser-based access—helping instructors monitor sessions at a glance.
• Improved Direct RDP mirroring controls: Instructors now see clearer feedback during Direct RDP session mirroring, with streamlined retry logic and two new controls:
  1. Mirror now for immediate retry; and
  2. Mirror session to restart mirroring after retries have stopped.
• New reference fields in Events: Add Event code and Billing code fields to event configurations (configurable at a tenancy level via Administration > Settings). Useful for API lookups, reporting, billing, or integrations.
• Parent column in Environment list: Quickly see which event or course an environment belongs to, with a clickable link for faster navigation. Toggle this column on/off as needed.
• Persistent sort preferences in lists: Lists now default to alphabetical by Name—but if you sort by a different column, the platform remembers your choice for next time.
• Delete resources directly from Detail pages: Remove individual VMs, templates, policies, and environments right from their Detail page (via the Actions menu)—reducing navigation steps and minimizing errors.

🔧 Bugfixes

• Visiting /login in a new tab no longer logs out active sessions in other tabs.
• SSO with MFA users can now sign in seamlessly without unexpected prompts / errors.
• Credential state updates (e.g. assignment status or visibility) now appear instantly without needing to refresh.

We look forward to your feedback!

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.

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 again!

We’re excited to share some news about a much requested enhancement to Heropa. We’ve added the ability for any changes to Templates and Policies to automatically update all environments. What this means is: 

• When a substantial change to a template is made, for example a change to a template's VMs, VM settings, or credentials.. any associated courses, non-provisioned environments, and event enrollments that have not yet launched, will have these changes automatically reflected in them. 
• When a substantial change to a policy is made, for example a change to its duration or auto-suspend or destruction rules.. any associated courses or non-provisioned environments, will have these changes automatically reflected in them. 

Before this update, if you made a change to a Template or Policy, you had to manually update each environment to apply the change. Now, with this new feature, any changes you make will be applied to the above associated objects automatically, saving you time and effort. Note: These updates will not affect environments that have already been provisioned / launched. 

We think this feature will help you get the most out of Heropa. Quickly and easily updating all your environments with the latest changes to your Templates and Policies is now a breeze.

We hope this update simplifies your workflow and helps you get the job done faster. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Thanks for using Heropa!

It's already easy to add custom colours for fonts, buttons and backgrounds via Administration / Settings / Branding. 

Further customizations to the Login page are now available, including:

• Adding a custom background image
• Adding a Welcome panel. This can be used to provide a welcome message and instructions to users when they first arrive to log in. 

A custom header and footer can also be added.

See: Configuring Settings.

Historically it's been very difficult to determine when a virtual machine should be shut down. The shutdown policy associated with the environment only takes effect when the user session is idle. Determining true idle states across all browsers has proven to be unreliable, thus causing VMs to run longer than customers expect.

We have now moved the ability to prevent VM shutdown to outside of the policy. The Policy Details page now allows a maximum running period of 12 hours. 

To allow a VM to run constantly, this now needs to be specified on the VM within a template or environment via a row action called 'Disable auto-suspend'. 

Any VM without this setting will automatically be shut down after 12 hours, regardless of user status.

We've introduced some new ways to categorise resources, which will make it easier for them to be managed and shared. 

It's now possible to add labels and tags to your Heropa instance, and then assign labels and tags to resources. In a nutshell:

Labels:

• We suggest using Labels to classify resources that are used and shared internally. 
• Once labels have been created, they can be assigned to resources in Heropa.   

Tags:

• Tags can be added to Courses and Events, and should be created when you want to classify these and have this visible in the end user Library. 

To learn how to create labels and tags, and add them to resources, see: Using Labels and Tags.

We’re excited to share that we’ve made some changes to the virtual classroom to make it easier for event hosts and instructors to manage their classrooms. Thanks for your feedback which helped shape these improvements, we hope they help you.

Firstly, we’ve re-organized the Classroom screen so that you can see more of your users' environments. The thumbnail aspect ratio has been modified to better match the most common connection size. This allows for an increased density in the classroom, while also reducing the pixel distortion.

To view or join a workspace, simply hover over a thumbnail. This replaces the previous methods. 

All other existing capability has been retained, with the following improvements added: 

• If a user is idle in the workspace, the thumbnail will show a small orange timer on the top right corner of the user panel, indicating how long they have been inactive 
  
• If you suspect the displayed user status is incorrect or a thumbnail is missing, try selecting ‘Refresh user status’ on the thumbnail. This will send the user a message notifying them to refresh their browser, which can often resolve any connection issues. 
  
• You can optionally show and hide the bottom panel of each thumbnail - containing the IP address and VM name - to free up space if needed. To show this information, use the bulk action 'Show details'.

Video content can now be included in a course to provide supporting content to a self-paced lab. Vimeo, Wistia and YouTube videos are supported.

Once a video has been added to a course, it can be viewed by clicking the button at the top of the workspace. 

To add video content to a course, see: Adding content to a course - Adding a video