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!

👋 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.

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.

👋 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! 

What is the Credential Manager?

The Credential Manager in Heropa provides a way to issue end users with unique sets of credentials to access external applications during their labs. We worked closely with one of our customers to create this, and we're pleased to announce it's now reached general availability. 

Why a Credential Manager? 

When training courses require learners to access other applications, issuing and managing sets of external application credentials involves a lot of manual effort. In self-paced training, this is even harder. Managing the lifecycle of credentials from user to user also requires considerable administrative effort. The Credential Manager was created to overcome all of these issues.   

How it works: 

1. Credential pools containing sets of credentials are added into Heropa.

2. Credential pools are associated with a template, course, environment or event.

3. Decide which properties to display per credential set, in what order, and where these will be displayed in the workspace (main or side panel). 

4. End users can then see the credential sets in their workspace, and use them to log into external applications during a lab.

Here's how the credentials look to a learner when presented in the main panel of the workspace:

The Credential Manager is available in some Heropa subscription tiers. To learn more, speak to your Heropa account manager. For more information, see: Using credentials.

✨We're excited to share that macOS VMs are now supported in your Heropa instance!✨ 

Our implementation of Amazon EC2 Mac instances allows for instant access to macOS environments running on real Apple hardware. If you have software running on macOS, training participants can be given a macOS desktops for hands-on learning, eliminating the need for physical Macbooks. Capacity can be scaled up or down as needed, helping to control costs. 

It's also a great result if you want to build training content or sales demo environments that are truly cross-platform. One Heropa customer has created a training course with both Windows and Mac in the same classroom environment, which provides for a great learner experience. 

Read more about it in our recent blog post: Using macOS desktops on-demand with Heropa.

Another useful resource is this article from our knowledge base, which outlines some important points to be aware of when running macOS in Heropa.

If you're interested in learning more about macOS VMs in Heropa, please get in touch! 

The team has been busily working away on a new module within Heropa, called Training Credits. This has been developed to provide an easy way for our customers to sell bundles of prepaid credits that can be redeemed for courses on Heropa. 

Customers using the Credits module need to first assign a credit value to their courses. Then, once credits are sold (outside of Heropa), a credit transaction can be added to a company in Heropa, giving them a credit balance. Each credit transaction is worth a predetermined amount of credits, with a set expiry date. 

The company's users can then be enrolled in courses on Heropa, deducting from the credit balance. Credits are reserved once a user is enrolled in a course, and only redeemed once the course is launched. 

Here's an example of a credit transaction worth 1000 credits, where 500 credits have been reserved due to an enrollment in a training course.

For more information, see: Training credits.

If you'd like to learn more about Training Credits, and see it in action, please speak to us!

We previously shared that VMs can be pinned to the top of the workspace so users can easily access and move between them. 

It's now possible for Admins to configure VM workspace settings for a template, environment, course or event. 

In the Configuration tab of the resource, configure: 

• Which VMs start automatically when the environment, course or event is launched
• Which VMs are visible in the workspace
• Which VMs are pinned to the top of the workspace by default. Note: Pinned VMs maintain an active console connection, so if users are regularly moving between multiple VMs in the workspace, pinning these VMs will provide the best user experience. Pinned VMs can be changed by a user as desired.
• The order that VMs are displayed in the workspace

See: Working with environments in the workspace.

One request we had from customers running Events in Heropa was for a way to easily share files with event participants during an event.

Introducing... Shared drive! 🎉   

Events can now be configured to include a shared drive. When configured, Windows VMs in the event will show a shared drive to facilitate file sharing during the event. Hosts, instructors and participants can view or download files in the drive, as well as add and remove files. 

For more information, see: Creating an event.