We’re excited to announce two new feature on our platform: Sandbox Presets and Shared Hot-Starts!

What are Sandbox Presets?

With Sandbox Presets, you can now save sandbox definitions separately from tracks. Think of them as building blocks for your tracks, that you define once and then reuse across many different tracks. You can use all the same resources as are currently available for your tracks (containers, virtual machines, cloud accounts).

This means you will have to spend less time setting up your sandbox environments and have more time to focus on what’s important — building great content. Plus, you can save and share presets with your team and other users, making collaboration easier than ever.

Read more about Sandbox Presets.

Which bring us to the second new feature: Shared Hot-Starts.

Using Sandbox Presets, we've enhanced our existing Hot-Start feature to make it more cost-effective. Previously, Hot Start pools had to be created for every track that you wanted to make available instantly to your learners, which meant you were probably creating more and bigger pools than actually required.

With Shared Hot-Starts, you can now create pools based on a Sandbox Preset. Hot-Start instances in those pools are shared and can be used by all tracks that are based on the same preset. This means hot-start pools can be used much more efficiently, allowing you to have more hot-start enabled tracks, at a fraction of the cost.

Read more about Shared Hot-Starts.

Both Sandbox Presets and Shared Hot-Starts are available for all our customers starting today. If you have any questions, our team is happy to help.

Happy content creating!

We're thrilled to announce a new feature designed to empower end users and boost their productivity. Say goodbye to interrupted sessions and track restarts! With our latest update, you can give your end users the option to extend their session duration, ensuring uninterrupted progress towards completing their tracks. Of course only if you want them to.

How to do it?

Head to your track details and toggle the extend time limit option. Then define the max time users can extend their session by and viola!

How does it work?

When your end user is working on your track and there are only 30 seconds left a modal will pop up asking them if they want to extend the time so they can keep working or end the session.

As always, please share your feedback with us and happy creating!

For more about this feature see our docs here

We know that gathering feedback from learners is a critical component of improving their experience, and we're committed to making it easier to collect their thoughts. That's why we're happy to inform you that learners can now always provide their written feedback, regardless of their rating. Before, only negative ratings would trigger the feedback prompt. With this change, we believe that you'll gain more insight into what learners loved about your content, as well as areas to improve.

We have some exciting updates for you

Assignment display settings

You can now customize your end users viewing experience with new features including the ability to set the starting position, adjust the starting width, and even make your content go behind the assignment. Your users can also pin content left or right. 

You will find these settings on your track details page.
*Please note this update is only available in the UI. Coming soon to a CLI near you

Loading
We’ve added a countdown and a loading bar to the lab to give your users a better idea of how long they’ll have to wait before they can start your track. We also added some messaging from Iggy to make the loading experience a little more fun for users.

Image (pictures) upload
Now, you can drag and drop pictures into your tracks and challenges directly in the UI, with no need to host the images or remember the markdown syntax.

Lightboxing
Your users can now click a picture in any challenge to see it full-sized. This is applied automatically when you add a picture to a challenge.

We're excited to announce updates to our platform's Track Invite feature that will help engage your users and drive lead generation. Changes include more form fields, a seamless user experience, and improved reporting capabilities. 

Boost your data collection with more form fields

You can now capture more information about your leads, from their company and job title to their country. With more data points, you'll be able to better understand your leads and tailor your outreach to their specific needs. The new form fields can be enabled from the 'Form' tab on the Invites overview, and will be applies to all gated invites (docs).

A seamless experience for your users

We understand how important it is to ensure a seamless user experience. That's why we've made it simpler for them to access your content. Invite links now lead directly to a branded content page, without extra steps or distractions. On gated invites, users will be gently prompted to leave their details, eliminating the need to sign up for an Instruqt account first. Try out the new flow here!

Improved reporting capabilities

We've also improved our reporting capabilities, providing more detailed reports on your users and their activity. With the new reporting capabilities, you'll be able to gain better insight into in their engagement and make more informed decisions to help grow your business.

We hope you enjoy these new features and improvements, and we're excited to hear your feedback. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

Over the past weeks we've been working on several changes to the recently introduced Live Events feature. Your feedback on it has been invaluable so we're happy to share the following improvements.

Manage sandboxes during a Live Events

It's now possible to monitor and manage attendee's sandboxes from the Live Event dashboard. This lets you easily troubleshoot, inspect machines, extend time to live (TTL) and stop sandboxes that are no longer needed.  To do so, click an attendees name on the Live Event dashboard and switch to the 'Sandboxes' tab.

Anonymous access on Live Events

Additionally, we’ve enabled the ‘anonymous access’ option for Live Events. This is useful in case you simply don’t need or want to collect any personal information when running a workshop. Attendees will appear as ‘Anonymous attendee #X’:

Remove attendees from the Live Event dashboard

Ever wanted to clean up attendees from the Live Event dashboard, for example after you tried out the invite link yourself, or someone accidentally joined? It's now possible to remove an attendee from the list, by clicking 'Remove attendee' from the contextual menu on any attendee:

End date now optional for Live Events

Last, we've made the Live Event 'ends on' date optional, so that the Live Event remains accessible to anyone after the event has taken place, if you wish so. This can be useful if you for example want to publish a webinar recording after the event, with the invite link attached.

Questions, suggestions? Please reach out as always!

We've made it possible to easily schedule a Hot Start pool for any given Track Invite. This will save you time when planning a workshop for example. To do so, click ‘Create Hot Start’ from the Invites overview, fill in the number of instances needed and you’re done. We’ll make sure everything spins up on time. 

Additionally, we’ve added the option to duplicate Hot Start pools, so that re-using (expired) pools is now possible as well.

Do you use Instruqt to attract new customers by offering them a hands-on demo experience?

From now on, you can take advantage of our ‘idle time’, by adjusting it to your own pace and sales needs, with no maximum limit on the idle timeout.

Our new demo-geared functionality enhances ‘idle time’ and offers flexible timing for your sessions. This way you can rest assured that your demos continue to be powered by Instruqt - and without any extra costs.

For more information feel free to contact Customer Success.

Tired of having to recreate your challenge from scratch each time?

Now you can duplicate a challenge and edit it from there. It comes with all the tabs and settings you created before to speed up your create journey.

How to use:
- Head to a track and select it it see its challenges
- Click "Duplicate" on the challenge you want to copy
- A copy is made and you can now edit the details
- Save the challenge when you are ready
- Congrats you just saved yourself some time

We're always looking for ways to help our customers spend their investments cost-effectively. During the past few months, we have been rolling out changes that allow us to better monitor learner (in)activity and terminate track environments after a (configurable) idle timeout. We've gotten great responses from those who have tried it so far, and the feature is now generally available. 

The new Idle timeout feature will trigger a warning message to learners who sit idle through a session without interacting with your content. If they don't confirm they're still there within 2 minutes, the environment will be terminated automatically.

The idle timeout is configurable per track. For example, let's say that you've set the idle timeout on your track to 300 seconds (5 minutes). If the user has been idle for 3 minutes, a warning message will pop up and ask the learner to respond. If after 2 minutes there's no response, the environment will be terminated. So the user will always have two minutes to react. 

In the case of live events, it may not be desirable to have tracks time out after a short idle time (for example while you’re presenting at a workshop). In those cases, we recommend not setting an idle_timeout value, or duplicating the track without an idle_timeout value.

To learn more about the idle timeout functionality and how to configure it, check out this Instruqt Docs and search for Idle timeout.