Recently we've shipped a set of improvements focused on running live, instructor-led sessions, creating better invites, and managing Hot Start pools – plus a refreshed set of best-practice guides. Here's what's new.

Export chat history from live sessions

You can now download the chat from a live session directly from the Live dashboard, so the questions, feedback, and follow-up items your participants share stay with you after the session ends. The download covers both messages to all users and direct messages, including attachments – each with the sender's name and timestamp – and stays available for 30 days after the session. See Analyze activity after the event for details.

Hot Start improvements

We made two changes to make Hot Start pools easier to manage day to day:

• Expiration date and time now show in the Hot Starts overview. The pools table has a new "Expiration date & time" column, so you can see at a glance which pools are about to expire and decide whether to pause, extend, or delete them – right from the overview.
• Clearer guidance on locked fields. A Hot Start pool's Scope and Target type define its structure and are set at creation. A new tooltip now surfaces this directly on the fields at both creation and edit time, making how these settings work clear at a glance. Documentation updated as well.

A richer invite creation experience

Public invite description now supports full rich text formatting: bold, italic, numbered lists, bullet points, and links. That means you can lay out agendas, prerequisites, schedules, and key details in a clear, structured way. The invite creation form has been redesigned to match. The title and description fields now stretch to the full width of the page, giving you far more room to write and review your content as you build the invite.

New updated guides & videos

We've reworked our best-practice documentation for running events and instructor-led training. If you deliver live sessions or manage Hot Start pools, these are worth a read:

• Hot Starts best practices, by event type. Hot Start setup isn't one-size-fits-all – a 50-person live workshop needs a different configuration than an always-on embedded lab. This guide gives pool sizing, provisioning lead time, auto-refill, and cleanup recommendations for each event type: self-paced on-demand training, live workshops, webinars, multi-day training, conference hands-on sessions, booth/expo demos, and single-prospect demos. Each comes with a worked example and the common mistakes to avoid. We’ve also created a video with the recommended setups for every event type.
• Understanding Hot Start settings. If you're setting up a Hot Start pool and aren't sure what each option does, this short video walks through the key settings in the creation flow – what each one controls and why it matters – so you can configure your pool with confidence.
• Workshop best practices, now with a step-by-step checklist. Our workshop guide has been restructured into a clear, phased checklist – pre-event planning (IP limits, Hot Start pre-provisioning), invitations and access control, day-of facilitation, and post-event wrap-up – so you can follow it end to end and not miss a step.
• Running live Instructor-Led Training sessions. A new comprehensive guide to the full ILT flow: getting ready for the session, facilitating the event, troubleshooting, and following up afterwards. It covers the three formats teams run most – on-site, virtual, and conference workshops – with the spe

We've made improvements to the Manage Hot Starts page to help you focus on what matters most.

See Running and Provisioning pools first

When you open the Hot Starts page, you'll now see your Running and Provisioning pools at the top by default - the ones that matter most to your day-to-day. Inactive, deleted, and all other statuses are still available - just use the filter on the page to select the ones you need to add to the view.

Your filter selections now stay put

And once you've set those filters the way you want them, they'll stay that way. Your selections are saved and stay persistent in your session on the device - so you don't have to reapply them every time you come back to the page.

You now have more flexibility in how Hot Starts pools are created. What's new: 

• Scope pools to a specific invite - so only invited users can claim pre-warmed sandboxes;
• Select which tracks in an invite need hot starting and remove the ones that don't;
• Pool by sandbox preset – in the invite-scoped Hot Starts, you can now create one pool that covers all tracks using the same preset, instead of multiplying per track.

This update applies to all newly created pools and invites – existing ones are not affected. Smarter pools, less waste! Check out the updated documentation for the full walkthrough.

We are thrilled to announce the rollout of our new Global Sandboxes (GS) feature for all Instruqt customers. This major update is engineered to deliver a significant performance enhancement for your globally distributed teams and learners.

Up until now, your containers, virtual machines, and website service hosts have been provisioned exclusively in the Europe region. For learners operating across other continents, this distance could, unfortunately, introduce noticeable extra latency when accessing their sandboxes.

Global Sandboxes (GS) is the game-changer, empowering Instruqt customers with the capability to provision these essential resources in the closest geographical region to the learner. Once this powerful feature is activated for your organization:

• For ad-hoc play: We will automatically spin up the sandbox hosts in the optimal, closest region to the learner, guaranteeing a faster, smoother experience.
• For hot start pools: Customers now have the strategic control to configure their pools with the region that is closest to their events or learners' locations. For existing hot start pools, we will initially default to europe_west1; however, you can easily adjust the region to suit your needs.

To confirm if this feature has been activated for your organization, please connect with your Customer Success Manager (CSM), or check for the new region drop-down field when provisioning a new hot start pool or editing an existing one. If you see the option to select a region, your team is ready to benefit from the speed and efficiency of Global Sandboxes!

Admins now have two new options when assigning a user the instructor role:

1. Instructor permissions can now be limited to prevent invite creation. To limit instructor roles so they can't create invites, contact the Instruqt team to enable this for you. Note, you can only have instructors who can create invites or instructors who can't. You cannot mix the instructor permissions 

2. When giving an instructor access to "all tracks," it will now grant access to all current and future tracks. Previously, it was just all current tracks. This will automatically be applied to the "all tracks" setting. 

Read more about permissions.

HANDS-ON is the industry-first event designed for the builders of developer adoption.

Whether you're in DevRel, product marketing, sales engineering, or enablement, this 2-hour experience is made for you. What’s on deck for the free, virtual event:

• 🚀 What’s next - 6 trends shaping developer adoption in 2026
• 🔧 What works - Real tactics for scaling hands-on GTM
• 💡 What inspires - Stories from the teams doing it best

We'll be revealing speakers, sessions, and exclusive giveaways all summer long. Don’t miss your chance to get ahead of the curve!

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