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! 

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.

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!

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.

A huge few months for us here at Heropa. 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    

• Credential Manager module: New capability providing a way to issue external application credentials to users in Heropa has reached general availability. Learn more about it here.
• In case you missed the post, on-demand macOS desktops are now available in Heropa.

🌱 Enhancements

• Improvements to the Access tab for Courses and Events: We've made some updates to make it easier for Admin users to manage access methods to a course or event. For LTI users, it's now easier to limit access to only via the LTI if needed. See: Providing users access to a course. 
• All resources - Sharing tab: The old Access tab contained features to help manage the sharing of resources across companies. Following on from the Access tab enhancements above, we've moved the sharing capability to a different tab, called 'Sharing'. See: Sharing resources across companies.
• Customizable Login page: In our last update, we shared how you can now update the Login page with branding elements and add instructions for users. Since then,  we've also added the ability to add a custom CSS block to this page. See: Configuring settings.
• Content preview: We've updated the content editor so that the preview panel is consistent with how the content is displayed in the workspace side panel.
• Credential Manager: When viewing details of a Credential pool, the column visibility in the Credentials tab is no longer linked to the toggles in the Configuration tab. This allows the column visibility to be specified and automatically saved to your user preferences.  

🔧 Bugfixes

• Reports inconsistencies: In the Courses and Companies reports, we fixed some inconsistencies identified between the summary and individual report data. 
• Usage report display: A bug impacting the display of date and VLU information in the VLU usage report has been fixed. 
• Events - Instructor management: Intermittent errors preventing instructors from being added to and removed from events have been fixed.
• Chrome tab display: We fixed an issue affecting the display of an object containing an ampersand in a Chrome browser tab. 
• Dashboard - Usage panel: We fixed all progress bars in this panel to show the percentage progress.
• VM Images List filter: A bug with the filter on the VM Images List page has been fixed. 

✨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! 

Did you know that the Heropa user experience can be made available in different languages? Both the Heropa portal and workspace support language localization. 

Admins can set a default language and then configure additional languages. Users can then choose their preferred language to work in.

To optimize the user experience in the workspace, a default keyboard layout can also be set. In the workspace, users can also select their preferred keyboard layout.  

For more information, see: Configuring languages.