We’re excited to introduce Slides, a new synchronized presentation experience built into Heropa’s Follow Host and integrated comms. Slides makes it easy for hosts to present supporting documentation, walkthroughs, and diagrams directly inside the workspace - so students stay focused and engaged without switching tools.

With Slides, hosts can guide the class through a PDF-based presentation, keep everyone perfectly in sync, and let students revisit slides at their own pace when the session ends.

Present with confidence

Slides lets you upload a PDF presentation (up to 20MB) directly in the Event configuration tab. Heropa automatically processes the file into optimized images for fast loading inside every workspace. Once uploaded, the presentation can be reused across events.

Before presenting, hosts upload their PDF and add presenter notes to each slide during the import process. During the event, they can view their notes alongside a next slide preview and use a built-in presentation timer to stay on track. This gives hosts a smoother, more polished teaching experience without juggling multiple windows.

Keep every student in sync

During the event, once the host is presenting, hosts can click Slides in the top navigation to start showing their slides. Students see the slides through the Host screen view, and as the host moves between slides, everyone automatically follows.

If the host enables Force follow, students are fully synchronized and cannot navigate independently - ideal for keeping the class aligned during key explanations. When Force follow is disabled, or the host stops presenting, students regain control and can move through the slide presentation on their own.

If the host exits the presentation entirely, students are taken straight back to their VM view.

Integrated with Follow Host

Slides works seamlessly with Heropa’s existing Follow Host capabilities. Hosts can switch between slides and live demonstrations in their VM with a single click. Students see every transition instantly, creating a smooth flow between explanation and hands-on practice.

Try it out

Slides is currently available behind a feature toggle. To enable it for your tenancy, reach out to Heropa Support.

For more information, see our support article: Presenting slides in events. 

Lots of great things in this release! We introduce several new capabilities, improves classroom usability, and resolves some key bugs.

✨ New features

• Open Workspace VMs in a new browser window - You can now pop out workspace VMs into a dedicated window for a focused workspace. The new window includes only the VM view and simple controls to close the window or return to the main workspace. The window automatically closes if the VM stops or leaves the running state. A preloader now appears in the workspace when a VM is selected. For more information see the announcement here.
• Slides for events - Hosts can present slide decks directly inside the classroom. Participants follow the host’s progression while still having the freedom to explore slides independently. For more information see the announcement here.

🌱 Enhancements

• Event classroom new layout - A refreshed classroom experience is now available behind a feature toggle. The updated UI removes the old top and bottom sections, adds a rounded mirroring area, introduces clearer VM power-state indicators, and improves visual cues for direct RDP, live view, and screenshot modes. Tile hover actions are simplified with clearer options for assistance requests, joining the workspace, and more.
• Environment list views - A new Public IP column displays the Public IP of the first visible and pinned VM in each environment, making it easier to locate and manage access details.
• Course deletion - When deleting a course that has an environment pool and where pool enrollments are the only ones linked to the course, the updated modal now resets the environment pool to zero before deleting enrollments and removing the course. This prevents admins from having to manually set environment pools to 0, and ensures a smoother cleanup flow.
• Credential properties dynamically embedded in content - Lab content now supports shortcodes that dynamically display credential values such as username, password, email, or custom fields. This removes the need for students to switch between lab content and the Credentials tab during exercises.
• Support for reusing LTI launch links across LMS courses and modules - A new configuration option allows LTI launches that differ only by module parameter to reuse the same enrollment. This enables embedding the same Heropa course/event across multiple LMS modules without generating duplicate environments.
• Shared templates - Shared templates can now be hidden using a new Hide template row action. Hidden templates appear with a new “Hidden” status and gray status color, and are hidden by default.

🔧 Fixes

• Visiting /login no longer logs the user out - The prior fix was rolled back due to an edge case that caused redirect loops. The underlying issue has now been fully resolved.
• Active user detection bug - Environments that are active and in use will no longer be incorrectly shut down when “Stop VMs after student inactivity” is enabled. A condition that incorrectly marked active environments as idle has been fixed.

Thanks as always for your continued support and feedback to help us improve Heropa. 

You can now open any VM from your workspace in a separate browser window, giving you more space, flexibility, and control over how you work. This makes it easier to follow instructions, view host presentations, or use multiple monitors without constantly switching tabs.

A more flexible way to work

This new feature lets you take any running VM and pop it out of the main workspace. Students can follow along with a host’s screen while keeping their own VM visible. Instructors and admins can use it to multitask across environments more effectively. It works everywhere: course enrollments, standalone environments, and event seats.

How it works

From the workspace, Click on the VM’s gear icon in the top navigation, select Open VM in new window.

A new browser window opens with a fully functional VM session. You can place it side by side with the main workspace or on a second monitor. Each VM in an environment can be opened into its own window. The host screen and follow-host options stay in the main workspace, so students can keep the host visible while interacting with their VM in another window.

When you’re done, you can return the VM to the main workspace in two ways:

• Open here (found in the main workspace window): Closes the pop-out and restores the VM to the workspace
• Close (found in the top bar of the pop-out workspace): Closes the pop-out and reopens the VM automatically in its original location

If the VM shuts down, reboots, or loses its browser RDP or SSH connection, the pop-out window closes automatically.

Wrap-up

Opening VMs in a new window makes hands-on work simpler and more efficient, especially when following a presentation or working with complex instructions. To reduce confusion for students, this feature is off by default. If your company would like to enable it, reach out to Heropa Support.

For more information, see our support article: Opening workspace VMs in a new browser window. 

We’re excited to roll out a new update packed with improvements that make Heropa more responsive, reliable, and enjoyable for instructors and students alike. This release brings smoother event creation, more stable classroom sessions, and smarter validation to help you deliver training with confidence and ease.

✨ New features

• New Zapier templates for seamless course and event automation – We’ve expanded our Zapier integration to make managing training completion effortless. The new Heropa + Arlo zapier templates use new triggers for course enrollment completion and event completion, allowing students to self-register, complete their training, and have grades and certifications automatically updated in Arlo, no manual administration required.
• New workspace controls for file uploads and copy & paste – Added new workspace options that give administrators greater control over how users interact with their VMs. A new Allow copy paste setting lets you enable or block copying and pasting into and out of the VM (while still allowing Copy to VM from content code blocks and credentials). The existing Allow file sharing option has also been updated to control whether users can drag and drop files into the workspace to upload them to their VMs.

🌱 Enhancements

• Improved event creation validation – Event creation now includes clearer inline error messages and enhanced start and end time validation for all event types, including custom events, making setup faster and more reliable.
• Event workspace and Follow Host improvements – Enhanced synchronization between instructors and participants in live sessions, improving reconnection handling, Follow Host behaviour, and overall audio/video reliability within event workspaces.
• Enhanced course and content viewing preferences – Heropa now remembers your preferred view settings across sessions for Courses, Content, Public IPs, and Hosts.
• Shared template management – Updated the confirmation modal when deleting shared templates for a clearer, safer experience.

🔧 Fixes

• Shared template import – Fixed an issue preventing import of shared templates in certain cases.
• User assignment to events – Fixed an issue assigning new users to events via the classroom page.
• Template status – Fixed template status sometimes remaining “Pending” after completion.
• Environment updates – Fixed an issue where the "Update" button stopped working if multiple changes were made to the same environment without refreshing the page.
• Event reporting – Fixed reports that previously excluded deleted users from results.
• DirectRDP countdown timers – Fixed multiple timers showing after closing workspace sessions.
• Login/logout behaviour – Visiting /login in a new tab no longer logs users out of active sessions elsewhere.
• Orphaned environment list – Fixed the Orphans page not loading correctly.
• UI fixes – Addressed button alignment, scroll, and modal visibility issues across multiple screens.

We look forward to your feedback!

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.