Product updates

Hi Guru Community! 👋 Today we’re releasing another update for our Slack app, designed to help you capture even more information in Guru Cards. You already have the ability to create a new Card from a Slack message or thread, but sometimes you really need to update a Card that already exists. That’s why we’re adding a new action so you can add content from a Slack message directly to an existing Card. Just use the add to existing Card action and you’ll be able to find the Card you need, update it, and publish it–all without leaving Slack!  Here are some of the ways you can use this new action: Updating projects: If a stakeholder gives an update on a project in a Slack message, they can add that update to the project’s Guru Card without leaving their workflow. Building FAQs: When a customer-facing team member asks a question in Slack, that answer can be added to an existing FAQ Card. This is great for keeping questions and answers organized by topic. Capturing stories from the field: At Guru, we capture and organize stories from our customer-facing teams in Cards. This update makes it even easier to make sure these stories get added to Guru Cards when they’re shared in Slack.  You’ll need to have the latest version of Guru’s Slack app installed so you can use this new action. Check out more information on updating your Slack app in the Help Center.

Hi Guru Community! 👋 Hot on the heels of our new navigation experience, we’ve added a new level of permissioning to Guru’s hierarchy. This is part of our ongoing work to improve how your knowledge is organized and accessed within Guru. Starting today, you’ll be able to add permissions to your Board Groups, just like you’ve been able to do with your Boards. You can now share a Board Group–which automatically shares the Boards, Sections, and Cards within that Board Group–with user Groups in Guru without sharing the entire Collection. With Board Group Permissions, you have more control over who sees what information, giving people across teams the right level of visibility into what’s going on in your part of the company.You’ll also notice that there have been updates made to the Board and Board Group sharing UI. These improvements were made to provide a more insightful view into who has access to specific content, and where that access came from within the overall content hierarchy. Check out our Help Center for more details on how Board Group and Board Permissions work. Updated UI for Board & Board Group permissions 

Hi Guru Community 👋 You asked and we listened: starting today, you’ll be able to search in Boards again in our web app! As part of this update, we’re introducing the ability to search in Collections in the web app as well. We’ve updated how this works so it lines up with the new navigation and the established search bar experience in Guru. Here’s a step-by-step walk through: Open a Collection. Enter search term in the bar below the Collection title. Your results will populate as you type. All Cards matching the query will appear. To search within a Board, hover over the Board title and click the magnifying glass. You will see the search bar below the Collection title populate with the Board name. Enter your search term next to the Board name. Your results will populate as you type. You will see Cards within that Board that match the query.  This is yet another step on our path towards a much more consistent, familiar, and flexible experience around organizing and browsing knowledge. Thank you for your feedback as we continue to build and improve! NOTE: This release does not include the ability to search within Board Groups. You can quickly tell the difference between Boards and Board Groups by looking at the icons. A single folder icon indicates a Board. You can search and filter results by Boards:A nested folder icon indicates a Board Group. You cannot search and filter results by Board Groups: We’d love to hear how your team is using this new capability! Leave a comment in this post, or head over to the Product Feedback area of the Community.

Hello everyone, It’s been a while since we checked in with a progress update on the ongoing Editor Rewrite project, which will provide a much better foundation for future development. I’ve recently taken over Product Management duties for the editor, and I wanted to share an update here.  The short form of this update is that we hear you, we want to get this right, and to make sure we do, our engineers are hard at work behind the scenes.  The longer story is that there’s a lot of effort that goes into adapting an open source editor to our specific setup and in all the places where people access Guru information (the web app, Slack, Teams, mobile…). Plus we need to ensure that editing existing content works well with the new editor once it's released.  After a thorough technical investigation we concluded that to do this successfully, we needed to start fresh rather than build on an increasingly shaky foundation. We've been hard at work on just that for the last few quarters--building an editor that will be easier to use and able to support the functionality you've all requested and we agree is critical to your success. Guru’s next editor will reduce friction, eliminate pesky bugs (for example: better accessibility, better copy and pasting, and more consistency between browsers), and lay the groundwork for many of the features you’ve been requesting. The editor rewrite is hotly anticipated by Guru users within Guru, too–we’re excited for improvements to content creation that will make our lives easier! We know that this has taken much longer than the timeline we shared initially. In order to speed progress over the last few months, we've made significant changes that included overhauling our development process, hiring new engineers, and bringing in the right subject matter experts. We're seeing very positive results from these changes and are confident that we are on the right track.  While we're not quite ready to offer a firm timeline for when the rewritten editor will be released, we are getting close to the point where we will be able to share that. We're doing everything we can to move that timeline forward--it's one of our highest priorities. As we complete a few crucial parts of this project over the next few weeks, we'll be able to offer a more definitive update. Be on the lookout for an update to this post from either Kate (Product Marketing Manager for this area of Guru) or myself in early September.  Thank you so much for your patience during this effort! We are looking forward to completing this work and moving on to the updates you're all looking for 🚀

Hey Guru Community 👋I wanted to share the news that we’ve released a new version of our Slack app today that will support the awesome new features we’re developing that will make Guru + Slack even more valuable. Just reinstall the Slack app today and you’ll be sure to receive the latest and greatest features. With the updated Slack app, users will have a better link unfurl experience. Link unfurls are previews of the contents of a Guru Card that appear when a link to that Card is shared in Slack. Here’s what’s changed today: Content snippets: Link unfurls now show a snippet of Card contents so people can get a sneak peek of what’s in a Card before clicking through to read it.  The preview will be controlled by the permissions of the person posting the link, just like what happens with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Content snippets will appear even if the Guru bot has not been invited to the channel. Remove Card previews: Because link unfurls are attached to the permissions of the person posting the link, people can choose to remove the Card preview from their Slack message. Accidentally shared the wrong link? Just edit your Slack message, remove the link and its preview, and voila–it’s all cleaned up! Links unfurl whether the Guru bot is in a channel or not: because the new link unfurl experience is controlled by the person who posts the link, unfurls will appear any time a link to a Guru Card is shared in Slack. You’ll still need to invite the Guru bot to a channel to create a Card from a message or thread!  Here’s what the new link unfurl design looks like, complete with a preview of Card contents and a clearer view of important information: And as a reminder, here’s the old experience, which was only available when the Guru bot was invited to a channel:  Here’s what you’ll need to do: a Guru admin will need to log on and reinstall the Slack app using the instructions in our Help Center. Note that Slack link unfurls won’t work until you’ve reinstalled the Guru app.  After reinstallation, your team members’ notification settings will stay the same, and the Guru bot will still be included in the channels to which it has been invited. We’re looking forward to hearing how you’re using Guru + Slack and making your experience even better!

Hello Guru Community 👋 I’m excited to share that Guru users now see company-wide announcements front and center in their Guru dashboard. We’re live today to all Guru users on the Builder plan and above, along with other major product updates Ly had shared in her Community post last week.One of the biggest challenges our customers face is keeping employees on the same page when it comes to company-wide initiatives. In order to make it easy to see the most important company-wide information at a glance, we’ve updated the dashboard in the Guru web app with a new section showing company-wide announcements. Just log into Guru’s web app and you’ll see the new dashboard, highlighting the most recent announcements that have been sent to the “all members” group in your Guru instance. Announcements sent to groups and individuals will still appear in the Tasks page, just like when this feature was called Knowledge Alerts.Leaders can rest easy knowing that employees can quickly rally around what’s important, in real time and without all the noise.We’d love to hear how your team is using the new dashboard! Leave a comment in this post, or head over to the Product Feedback area of the Community.We hope you’ll love this new experience as much as we do!  PS - Missing the Trust Score on the dashboard? If you’re on the Builder plan or above, you can still see your Trust Score in the Analytics section of the web app. Trust Scores will still appear on individual Collections. Don’t miss our other updates released today:Announcements: the new name for Knowledge Alerts Updated Guru navigation with nested structure 

Hello Guru Community 👋With Guru’s announcements feature, it’s easy to send information to everyone on your Guru team and confirm they’ve seen it.We’ve learned a lot from our customers that use Knowledge Alerts, and we’re re-naming that feature to announcements because we’ve seen how effective they are at flagging the most important information that people need to know.When you send an announcement, team members will be prompted to read the Card (either in Guru, Slack, Teams, or email) and acknowledge that they’ve read the information. You can then get a report of who’s read the Card, and make sure everyone’s on the same page. And with the updates to this feature released earlier this year, it’s even easier to send announcements to individuals, groups, or to your whole team on Guru.We’d love to hear how your team is using announcements! Leave a comment in this post, or head over to the Product Feedback area of the Community. Don’t miss our other updates released today! New area for announcements on the Guru web app dashboardUpdated Guru navigation with nested structure

Hello Guru Community 👋I’m excited to announce Guru’s new navigation. There are times when you need to dive deeper into your company’s shared knowledge. Getting oriented to a project in flight, adapting to a new role, or understanding an updated team structure involves looking at information across multiple Cards, stored in Collections and Boards. And if you’re an admin or a subject matter expert (or both!), the process of organizing, adding, or moving information should be simple. Your software should work for you, not the other way around!You go through thousands of micro-interactions with software everyday, and our new navigation is updated to reduce the friction of your interactions with Guru. More intuitive structure, lower cognitive load, smoother micro-interactions, happier you.That’s why we’re releasing a new navigation experience that makes it easier to see where information lives in Guru (and keep it organized once it’s there): Left sidebar navigation: We’ve rearranged our top nav menu into a familiar left sidebar that gets people to the areas of Guru that are most important, more quickly. Here’s what we love about the new nav: Get to your team settings faster so you can take important administrative actions like managing users, updating your groups, and adding integrations. Easily see your tasks, including an alert notification when you have a new announcement or need to verify a card. And speaking of getting where you need to go, faster… Pinned Collections: We’ve added the ability to pin Collections to your left sidebar, so people can customize their browsing experience (and never lose that handy Collection again). Just go to the All Collections link and click the pin on any Collection.  We’re using pinned Collections to customize Guru so we can find what we need, faster.  This is a great complement to our existing Favorite Cards and Boards feature! Collapsible menu: We’ve also made the left sidebar collapsible to give you some extra room to view Collection structure and Card information. Here’s why the collapsible menu is a refreshing change at Guru HQ: We’re using the collapsible menu to free up real estate so we can more easily read card contents. If we need a reminder on the contents of the left nav, we can just expand it, see titles, and collapse it again. Just click the hamburger icon at the top left (next to your company name) and try it out for yourself! Nested Collection menu: Within Collections, we’ve created a nested menu that helps users see not just Cards, but where they’re located in your knowledge structure. It’s simpler to browse, and easier to consume information. We’re benefitting from the new nested look already: Moving a Board to a different Collection is a lot simpler! Click the three dots next to a Board, and you’ll see a “Move to” option. Select that and you’ll step through the process to move the whole Board and all the Cards within it to a different Collection.​​​​​​​ It’s a lot easier to add Board Groups, Boards, and Sections. Just click the “+” icon next to a Board Group or Board and you’ll be prompted to add the right kind of content, right where it belongs. Here’s what that looked like before: And with the new look:

Hey Guru Community! 👋 We love Slack, you love Slack, and now we’re giving you more to love about Slack + Guru. If you check out your Guru Slack App*, you’ll see a brand new Home tab that gives you a run-down of all the things you can do with Guru, right inside your Slack workflows.Here’s what’s new on the Guru Slack App Home tab: Instructions on how to search, answer questions, and create a card from a Slack message List of cards to verify (and you don’t have to leave Slack to verify them!) Manage your activity feeds: See the feeds you’ve already created, edit them, and add new feeds  Activity feeds automatically send a message to the feed channel whenever a new card is created. It’s a great way for people to see what’s new, as soon as it’s posted, in an easy, self-serve way. You can set up activity feeds for Collections or Boards. Manage your notifications settings: Make sure your notifications are on so you don’t miss important alerts from Guru!  *And if you don’t have the Guru Slack App, here are instructions on how you (or your Guru admin) can install it today. 

Howdy, Guru Community! 🤠We’re SUPER excited to share some updates with you! Many of you have built out awesome integrations using different components of our Developer Network. Since we’ve seen an uptick in development, and because YOU asked for it, we've updated and expanded our Developer Network documentation to make these resources even better!Here’s what we’ve added:Changelog We’ve added a Changelog page to our Developer Network site - this is where we’ll let you know when we make changes to specific API endpoints or Guides. New API Endpoints We’ve added 35 (yep - you read that right 35!) new API endpoints - see which ones are new in our most recent Changelog post. Guides We’ve re-grouped our Guides to follow a more intuitive structure. In the Guides section, you’ll find inspo and how-tos for connecting Guru to your company’s tech stack. While we’re excited to provide these updates, rest assured that our work is not done! We will be continually evaluating our documentation and tools we provide to you. As always, we rely on your feedback, so please let us know how we can make your lives easier when working with the Guru Developer Network.Happy Integrating!

Hi everyone! We know how important it is to be able to link Guru Cards to one another to create continuity across your knowledge base, so we’re excited to provide more context around how and where your Cards are linked to each other in Guru. On the details tab of a Card, you’ll now be able to see how many other Cards in Guru link to that Card. 20 other Cards in Guru include a link to this Card written by Guru’s co-founder and CEO, Rick.Providing a list of Cards that link to a Guru Card will help both authors and end users understand the significance of that Card’s topic and the sprawl of that information. Seeing that a Card is linked to from 10 other Cards can help you draw connections between knowledge across authors and Collections. Users will only be able to see the Card titles in the linked list that they have permission to view; any other Cards will display as inaccessible so as to maintain your knowledge security.Card titles will not display to users who do not have permissions to view that Card.This additional context is especially important when it comes to archiving Cards – without understanding how any given Guru Card is referenced throughout your knowledge base, it’s impossible to understand the impact of archiving that Card. If Card A includes a link to Card B and Card B is archived, the link on the Card A becomes broken. Broken Guru links create a confusing experience for users and leads to dead ends in your knowledge base. By providing visibility into how many Guru Cards link to a given Card, authors can proactively remove or update those links before archiving a Card, or even rethink archiving that Card in the first place. We hope this update improves your ability to make connections between information in Guru and helps you keep your knowledge base clean and accurate. Let us know how you plan on using this new information to better manage your knowledge in Guru!

Hi Guru Community! To help provide more context about where a given Card lives within your knowledge base, we’ve expanded on-Card breadcrumbs in Guru to reflect every part of the knowledge hierarchy. Now you will see the full path to a given Card, including Collection, Board Group, Board, and/or Section (when applicable). Each part of the breadcrumb will be clickable, allowing for easier navigation between the layers of your knowledge hierarchy in Guru.Expanded breadcrumbs show how individual Cards ladder up to broader topics and promote knowledge discovery.Providing a full breadcrumb path is important for orienting users within a knowledge structure. Being able to see the visual navigation path from the broad Collection name down to the specific Card title helps users understand the broader context of any given topic. We also hope to promote enhanced knowledge discovery by making each breadcrumb element clickable. We know that content creators put a lot of thought and energy into knowledge organization; now end users will be able to see more of that organization, whether they navigate through the whole structure down to a specific Card, or simply arrive at an endpoint via search.For the time being, you’ll only see expanded breadcrumbs on Cards that live on a single Board. We will look to add support for breadcrumbs for Cards that live on multiple boards as a follow up. You’ll also notice that we moved the ‘Edit Board’ functionality from the top of the Card to the ‘More options’ menu on the side of the Card to make more room to expose expanded breadcrumbs. You’ll still be able to add Cards to Boards, remove Cards from Boards, and create new Boards all from the Card view, you’ll just find that functionality in a new location.You can add or remove Cards from Boards in the ‘More options’ menu.We hope you and your users find value in having more visibility into on-Card breadcrumbs! Thanks to those who highlighted the need for this functionality by sharing feedback here in the Community. You are integral in helping us make Guru better!

As many of you know, search has been a top priority of ours for a while. You might have noticed this from our roadmap updates (shared here quarterly!) or past announcements like the new algorithm, and snippets and highlighting. The consistency of this theme is because we know that search is critical to Guru serving you well, and it’s a top area of feedback. In light of this, we’re delighted to share our latest improvement to search for two reasons. First, it’s already having a positive impact on search performance, and second, because the technology powering it sets us up really well for improvements in the future - even beyond search!  Cool, what’s this fancy new tech?This improvement takes advantage of transformers–one of the fastest developing areas within machine learning, and specifically the deep learning space. Adding this technology means that Guru can now interpret the meaning of content. 🤯  If you’re following the search industry, this area is called “vector” or “neural” search and it’s a big step forward. Transformers can interpret meaning because they learn how words are used in various contexts by paying close attention to other words and their order. Once they capture the meaning of a sequence of words they represent that sequence as a vector (a list of numbers). For example, "bank" has a different vector in "take money out of a bank" than in "along the Schuylkill river bank.” Representing text as vectors then makes it possible to use math to reason about different sets of text: these two pieces of content are similar, these two are not similar, this text is often found alongside this text, etc. AI-powered search is pretty cool, right? How does this help Guru’s search?We know from our data and your feedback that it’s not unusual for someone to search for something, not see what they need at the top of the list, search again, perhaps with slightly different wording, and then choose a Card that was in their original results list. Since most people focus on just the top few search results, this isn’t surprising. If a Card is not in the top five results, it often doesn’t get much attention (more than 90% of actions on our search results page happen within the first five results). For that reason, we know it’s critical that the most relevant results are as high in the list as possible. We also know from feedback, and personal experience, that having to remember keywords is not an easy way to locate the information you need.   With this improvement, Guru uses its new ability to infer the meaning of search terms and Card content as a way to re-order results for each search to ensure that the most relevant Cards are as high in the list as possible. This helps reduce the need to use the “right” terminology for a search. What does this look like in practice? Within our own company we see many searches for “wfh” and “work from home,” which intuitively, as humans, we know are related phrases. Before this update these two searches yielded very differently ordered results lists. Now, regardless of which is provided as a search term, at least two Cards related to our employee policies, which is usually what employees want, are in the top four results–jumps, in some cases, of multiple spots up the results list. In addition to using the meaning distilled from Cards and search terms, Guru now also takes into account the collective intelligence of your team as it searches for knowledge. Specifically, Guru pays attention to the meaning of all the different search terms used by your team and how users interact with results and uses what it learns from those actions as another factor when determining relevance. This means less figuring out what words to search with to get to the content you need because your teammates have already done that work and Guru has learned from it.Keep in mind that this new machine learning technology is one piece of a growing search architecture, there are many things that go into relevance. Illustration of an example search and result. Neat! You said this release has already improved search performance. How so?This enhancement finished rolling out on February 24th so we now have several weeks of data to review. We keep track of quite a few metrics for search, most based on click data and the type of interactions users have with results: do they open them, copy them, favorite them, etc. One of our main metrics focuses on how often someone interacts with a Card in the top five results, and what rank it had (was it first, second, third, etc.). This is an industry standard way of measuring search performance (for the search aficionados among you, this metric is MAP). Thus far we’ve seen the median of this metric improve more than 6%, which makes this one of the more impactful improvements of the last year. Being a median, this means some customers have seen significantly more improvement–some well over 10%!! We’ve also seen more than 8.5% improvement in searches where three or more words were provided (about 30% of searches)–which makes sense, the more words there are, the more content for Guru to glean meaning from. TL;DR: the numbers are looking good, and we believe there will be additional positive shift as the model gets to see more activity over time. What are the additional potential improvements you mentioned?It took a significant effort to put this technology in place but we decided it was worth it because it has great potential, even beyond search. With this new ability to relate content based on meaning, Guru could do things like form a picture of what content you tend to look at, and provide suggestions for content that’s similar in meaning. Additionally, since meaning is mostly language agnostic, Guru could draw relationships between content that is in different languages. Imagine searching in French and getting back the most relevant content that happens to be in English (which you also speak)! The possibilities are nearly endless and we’re so optimistic about them, we could write a whole blog post on the topic (actually we have, look for it later this week). That said, we’ll have to see where the road takes us – these are ideas, not a roadmap :) All this is cool, but this is a long post.Totally, this was a big update and there was a lot to share so we appreciate you sticking with us!  Also, while we’re pleased with the impact this update has had so far, we know there is still a lot of room to improve search so this is by no means the end of the road. There are many more algorithm, machine learning, and user experience updates to come. As always, if you have questions about this improvement, or search generally, please let us know in the comments below or reach out to our Support team. Thanks!  

Hi Guru Community! 👋 It's been a few months since our last Product Roadmap announcement and we wanted to check in and let you know the latest. This roadmap looks out about 6 months. It outlines the big projects that our product teams are focusing on, but doesn't include everything we'll work on — there will be lots of little updates you can follow right here in the product updates section of the Guru Community. 1H 2022: Simplicity is innovativeThe theme of our Roadmap for the first half of 2022 is Simplicity is Innovative. This is one of our guiding product principles here at Guru, so we wanted to center our roadmap narrative around how we’re working to make Guru as simple and easy to use as possible. We know that there are many places that company information can and does live, so we want to make sure that when you choose to keep it in Guru, that’s an easy decision for you and your users. You'll see the theme of simplicity represented throughout our three persistent Roadmap focus areas. PRODUCT FOCUS AREAS We segment our Roadmap features using the following three focus areas: Ecosystem, Experience, and Administration. The features in our 1H Roadmap will nest under these themes. Ecosystem: One of our guiding product principles at Guru is "plays well with others" — we live in a world of ever-expanding apps, tabs, notifications, and devices, all vying for your attention. Our ecosystem roadmap is all about meeting you and your team, wherever you're working, and helping you be more productive. Experience: Sometimes we focus on new and shiny objects, but as a knowledge product, the core of what we do is pretty simple. It should be easy for authors to write and store great content, it should be easy for searchers to find the content they’re looking for, and it should be easy for team members to collaborate. Our emphasis on experience is all about these core experiences. Administration: Managing your Guru instance should be easy, too. You shouldn't have to spend all your time managing your content, users, and permissions. Instead, you should be able to spend your time creating, sharing, and enjoying information. Our administration roadmap is all about making the lives of our admins easier.  ECOSYSTEM Slack integration enhancementsGuru’s Slack integration is a key element of our promise to live where our users work. That promise is so important to us that we’ve made it one of our core product principles. And Guru users have been doing a lot of work in Slack! In 2021, our users had over 1.2 million interactions with Guru’s Slackbot. That adds up to tens of thousands of questions answered, cards verified and knowledge shared–and tens of thousands of people whose days were made just a little bit easier because they found knowledge where they were working. We love it when information flows along with your workflows, so we’re making enhancements to our Slack integration to make it even easier to use.We recently upgraded our Slack app to support org-wide deployment, a feature that allows admins to install Guru’s Slack app across an entire organization instead of having to install separately for each of the workspaces associated with their org. This feature is available today and puts Guru’s app in Slack’s elite enterprise-ready category–we’re built to scale along with your company! We also know that while some people are slash-command wizards who know their Slack shortcuts inside and out, there are lots of people who could use help getting up to speed with Guru’s Slack app. That’s why we’re updating our Slack app to make it easier for everyone to get the most out of their Guru + Slack experience. Updates to Guru’s Slack integration will be released later this spring. EXPERIENCE SearchIf you’ve attended a previous roadmap session, you’ll know that search is a permanent fixture on our roadmap. That’s because search is a core tenet of the Guru experience.And we also know how important powerful search is to you: search is one of our highest feedback areas. We hear you and are committed to improving Guru’s search experience. Here are some of the ways we’ve improved search since the last update: Machine Learning-Powered Search Updates (coming very soon!): We know both from feedback and from our data that users often miss relevant cards because they aren't high enough in the results list. With this update, Guru will use the meaning of cards and search terms as a way to ensure that the most relevant cards are as high as possible in the result list even if the language in the search terms and cards differs. This means that when someone wants to know your policy on taking time off, they won’t need to guess whether you call it PTO or vacation! More Context in Search Results: You asked for it and we heard you: Guru search results pages now include highlighted keywords and snippets of card contents. Now it’s a lot easier to know what cards to open because the relevant keywords are highlighted on search results pages. New Search Algorithm: Updating search is a continuous effort, and we’re always investing to stay on top of industry best practices that make finding knowledge simpler. The new algorithm has already improved how synonyms are treated as well as how punctuation and spacing are handled, plus we’ll be able to deliver future enhancements even faster!  EditorThe editor is also a familiar topic on our roadmap, but this time with a bit of a twist. Because creating and editing knowledge is so important to the foundation of Guru, we’re moving forward with a complete rewrite of our editor. Since we announced our decision to invest in this project back in September 2021, we’re beginning to move forward with important milestones! Here’s a refresher on what you can expect as we continue work. By rewriting the editor, we will deliver: More frequent feature updates Improved editor performance Fewer bugs  This project requires a significant time investment on our part, so we appreciate you bearing with us while we pause all other authoring-related work in order to focus on the editor. We are excited about how effectively we will be able to iterate on this new and stronger foundation later this year! TemplatesLet’s face it—sometimes the hardest part of documenting your own knowledge is just figuring out where to start. For experts on product details to HR processes, sometimes we all need a little inspiration to get the writing juices flowing. That’s why we’ve worked with our customers to curate hundreds of Card Templates designed to give you a kickstart on all types of documentation in Guru. We’re investing in making templates more actionable and simpler to use for your whole team to use. We’re also continuing to invest in new, expert-created Templates to keep the inspiration coming. Check out the template gallery to see what’s new for you!       ADMINISTRATION Knowledge Alerts EnhancementsKnowledge Alerts is an area of Guru that we have been pleasantly surprised and intrigued to observe how our customers use – even in ways we hadn't anticipated. With the rise of hybrid work, we're seeing more and more customers rely on Knowledge Alerts not just to share knowledge, but to help their teams find the signal through the noise. To that end, we’re continuing to make it simpler to send and receive Knowledge Alerts in ways that fit into your workflows. We’ve released a series of updates to Knowledge Alerts that make it easier for admins to send them, while also improving visibility for both readers and authors. Here’s what’s new: You can now send Knowledge Alerts to individual users, increasing the flexibility of the feature. Knowledge Alerts can be sent for restricted cards, as long as users have access to read those cards. We've made it easier to send a Knowledge Alert to any group if the All Members group is permissioned on the Collection. Users can revisit past Knowledge Alerts that they’ve already read, so they can get a refresher when they need it. Subject Matter Experts can see all Knowledge Alerts sent from Collections they have Author access to, making it easier to understand what comms are going out to the company.  New Import OptionsWe understand: there are a lot of tools your company is using–or used to use–to store information and content. It’s our job to make it easy to get that information into Guru so it can be seen, shared, and used by people across your company. With that in mind, we’ve updated our import feature to add a bunch of new source options and improve visibility into the progress of your import. In addition to our existing Confluence, Zendesk Help site, and spreadsheet importer options, you’ll now see options for: Notion Slab Google Docs Google Sites Word Docs PDFs  1H 2022 RECAPTo recap, here are some of the items that we've released since the last Roadmap session, and some that are still in progress. As a reminder, this list is only inclusive of major roadmap items, not exhaustive of all releases. Since our last roadmap session, we’ve released: Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancements New search algorithm New content import options, including Notion, Slab, and Google Docs Snippets and highlighting for search results  In progress items include: An editor rewrite that will provide a strong foundation for future authoring and editing functionality, like in-line comments and collaborative workflows Continued Slack integration enhancements Continued work on making Guru more accessible and intuitive Continued search improvements  FinThat's all for our 1H Roadmap update! Thanks for tagging along. We'll revisit the roadmap in the fall and provide a new vision for the following six months. See you then! We've also created a public Guru card with our H1 2022 roadmap that you can bookmark and share.

Hi Guru Community! My name is Steph, and I’m a product manager here at Guru. It’s been exciting to see this community grow and I want to convey how appreciative the product organization is of your engagement throughout the past couple of months. Your feedback and questions give our team so many valuable insights and keep us inspired as we work to build a better Guru! I’ve also been incredibly impressed by how the Guru community has supported each other by sharing ideas, learnings, and encouragement with fellow Guru users. Let’s jump into our second quarterly review! Between November and January, you added:  45 new feedback posts  320 votes on feedback posts During that time we were also able to make progress on several pieces of feedback:  4 enhancements were released (see all completed feedback) Ability to send a Knowledge Alert to any group (4 votes) Track all Knowledge Alerts across entire team (31 votes) Send Knowledge Alert to Individual Users (12 votes) Guru Card show better preview in Slack even if the Card is private (8 votes) 2 are currently scheduled for development Have boards show up in search results (14 votes) Not easy to navigate long search results list (6 votes)   Stay tuned for more roadmap info. Thank you again for all of your engagement. We’re looking forward to the quarter ahead! 

We know how important it is to be able to cut through the daily noise to share important updates internally, which is why we’re excited to announce several significant enhancements to Guru’s announcements (fka “Knowledge Alerts”) functionality. Announcements allow you to proactively send a Guru Card to a specified audience and ask that audience to confirm that they’ve read it. This functionality is relied on by many customers like you to enable critical internal communications in this hybrid work world, so we’ve prioritized making that workflow even more robust. Read on to learn how we’ve increased both the flexibility of sending announcements and your visibility into sent announcements. NOTE: for the most up-to-date overview of announcements capabilities, please see this Help Center article. Making it easier to send announcements: Send announcements to individual users. Previously, users could only send an announcement to a group in Guru, not an individual user. As highlighted in this Community feedback post, this limitation often led to the creation of new groups just to be able to send an announcement to the right people. To remove that friction, you can now send an announcement to groups and/or individuals as you see fit! Send an announcement to any group if the All Members group is permissioned on the Collection. To send an announcement to a group, you previously had to make sure that that group was added to the Collection that housed the Card, even if that Collection was already shared with All Members. This led to duplicate groups being permissioned on Collections solely to be able to receive announcements. To simplify permissioning, you can now select any group to receive an announcement when the All Members group has been added to a Collection, without having to add each additional group to the Collection as well. Send an announcement from a restricted Card. Restricted Cards are only visible to individuals who have been invited to view the Card by the Card’s author. Now that Guru supports sending announcements to individuals, authors can also send announcements from restricted Cards to individuals who have access to the restricted Card.  Note: Restricted Cards cannot be shared with groups, so announcements on restricted Cards may not be sent to groups.Improving visibility into announcements: Allow users to revisit announcements they’ve already read. After a user confirms that they’ve read an announcement, there has been no way to re-review that alert. Announcement senders often include context as to why they're requesting users read a Card, and that context is lost once the announcement is dismissed. Moving forward, we have added the ability to view all previously-read announcements so users can reference important info that has been shared with them, even after they've confirmed they read it. Toggle between ‘read’ and ‘unread’ announcements to maintain a running list of important updates you’ve received in Guru. Show Authors all sent announcements in Collections they have Author access to. Another popular announcement feedback item from the Community tells us that Authors and Collection Owners desire visibility into all the announcements sent by their teams from a given Collection to understand what comms are going out to the broader organization. Now, Authors and Collection Owners can see all sent announcements for Collections that they have Author or Collection Owner access to. Note: This functionality does not give Admins the ability to see all announcements sent across every Collection; only across Collections in which they have Author access.   Update styling of announcements. To better improve visibility into announcements, we’ve made subtle updates to the styling of the interface and overall announcements experience. We hope you enjoy these updates that make announcements easier to send and increase visibility into sent announcements. Thanks to those of you who have submitted and voted on announcements feedback items in this Community! We appreciate you sharing with us how we can make Guru better for you and your teams. We can’t wait to hear how you use this new functionality to share knowledge and improve internal comms across your organization!

New year, new search algorithm. We’re excited to release a new search algorithm for Guru. It’s a change you won't see, but you should feel. This algorithm sets the stage for us to build and iterate on search faster than ever before, and paves the way for us to roll out some exciting new machine learning components that we can’t wait for you to see. Specific enhancements that accompany this new algorithm include:Improvements to how Guru search handles punctuation and spaces between words. Guru isn’t the grammar police (that’s a different green G 👀) but previously, many grammar issues could interfere with your search results. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether it’s self serve or self-serve when looking for resources in Guru. Spaces or hyphens aside, we get what you mean. A new method for determining how to weigh different inputs when determining Card relevance. Inputs like Card usage or where in a Card a match was found inform a Card’s relevance – aka where it appears on the search results page. Adding a new method for weighing these inputs makes it easier for Guru to set the right balance for search result relevance as it takes more and more data into consideration. (Psst! If this sounds super interesting to you, you have something in common with our Data Scientists! Watch Nina and Jenna talk about this cool new technique at the 2021 Haystack Search Relevance Conference to learn more.) A new synonym architecture. Speaking of grammar, we took this opportunity to re-think how Guru supports identifying synonyms and have given ourselves a new structure that makes it easier for us to iteratively improve this part of search in the future. And most importantly, support for new machine learning components. This new algorithm will make it easier for us to build new search elements into Guru, particularly components that get at the meaning of your search, more so than the individual words. More on this soon! We hope this algorithm update improves your search experience in Guru. If you don’t notice a difference, that means the algorithm is doing its thing. We’ll keep you posted on our next round of updates! Happy searching :)

Maybe you collaborate on new policies in Google Docs, and want to be able to move them into Guru once you’re done. Or maybe you’ve finally convinced another department using Notion that it’s time to get on the Guru train. However you get here, when you want to move content into Guru, you want to do so quickly and easily.Luckily for you, last week we unveiled new Import options. In Team Settings, when you want to import content  into a Collection, in addition to existing import options for Confluence, Zendesk Help sites, and our Spreadsheet Importer, you’ll now see options for:Notion Slab Google Docs Google Sites Word Docs PDFs TIP: Are you new to importing content in Guru? Check out our help center for instructions on in-app options to migrate content into Guru.We’ve also improved the import experience to show you more of what’s going on as your content uploads. You’ll see a progress bar and clear messaging on each step of the way, especially if something goes wrong.  Step-by-step guide for importing content Depending on the amount of content you’re importing into Guru, it can take some time, but don’t worry! You’ll get an email confirmation once your upload is complete. Email confirmation of completed importWe hope these additional options make adding content to Guru faster and simpler. Please let us know in the comments if you give them a try or, if you have a suggestion for additional import options, please share that with us in the Product Feedback area.

Hello, Guru Community!My name is Mitch, and I’m the co-founder and CTO of Guru. I’m happy to see so many of you here and appreciate the time and enthusiasm you’ve put into making our new community platform so powerful.Many of our goals for this new platform revolve around your feedback—streamlining ways to give it, vote on it, follow along with it, and more. Your perspective is a key input to our product roadmap, so we’re very happy to have this new space where you can connect directly with our Product team and discuss ways to make Guru even more powerful. I want to personally thank you all for using the Community, and share our first quarterly review of your feedback and its impact on our plans. Let’s jump in!Between August and October, you added: 80+ new feedback posts (in addition to 200+ posts migrated from our old platform) 480+ votes for feedback that resonates with youDuring that time we were also able to make progress on several pieces of feedback: 2 enhancements were released (see all completed feedback) Difficulty finding context of cards in search (5 votes) Ability to filter collection list in Admin panel (7 votes) and 4 are currently in development Track all knowledge alerts across entire team (27 votes) Send knowledge alerts to individual users (11 votes) Not easy to navigate long search results list (5 votes) Have boards show up in search results (13 votes) In addition to these upcoming enhancements, be sure to check out our latest roadmap update to learn about the other exciting work we’re tackling. We’re looking forward to seeing the great ideas that continue to come from this group. We’re very thankful to have such an engaged and active customer base helping us build a better Guru 

Hey all! We know how important it is to be able to quickly and clearly access data on how your team is using Guru. Which is why I’m super excited to share that the latest update to improve the user experience and performance of Guru involves our Analytics! What changes did we make? We updated the Analytics tab to have a fresh look and feel with clean colors, larger font sizes, and easy-to-use filters. You should also notice faster loading times when first accessing the different Analytics sub-tabs and when applying filters or drilldowns.  Here’s a comparison of the changes: The data being displayed hasn’t changed, but it should be easier to read and digest now. We hope you find these enhancements helpful! Please comment any questions below, and check out our getting started with Analytics article!

Hi all! We are excited to ✨highlight✨ our newest UI enhancements to the search results page: the addition of snippets and highlighting to make search results more informative. Highlighting and snippets on search results. We've heard consistent feedback in user interviews, NPS comments, and here in the Community (thanks, Craig, for popularizing this item!) that simply providing more information per search result would be helpful for determining which Card is the one you’re actually looking for. Displaying additional information makes it easier to see how search results relate to the search terms provided, and to pick a Card from the results list. You should already see snippets and highlights appearing on your Guru web app search results page.What are snippets and highlights?When returning results for a search, Guru will now display continuous snippets of up to 200 characters from the body of a Card based on the content of your search. If there is a section of the Card that’s determined to be particularly relevant, Guru will display that; otherwise, it will display the beginning of the Card content. If content in an attachment or attachment name matches the search terms, a note that “Match found in <file name>” is displayed, like so: Match found in attachment indicator.(Learn more about what content Guru indexes for search in our Help Center.) Up to 3 attachments will be listed for each result in order of how well Guru determines they apply to the search terms. If a Card contains more attachments, there may be matches in those too but they won’t be listed in the search results.Guru now also highlights, in purple, close matches to the search terms that occur in the title and/or body of a Card. Guru does consider more than matching terms when determining which Cards are relevant for a search, (learn more about how Guru determines relevancy), but we found this approach to be most useful during testing. Guru does not highlight matches in tags, since they are already visually displayed in search results. In most cases, stop words (e.g.: the, with, a, an, at, it, is are...) will not be highlighted, even if they are included in longer search terms like “what are our core values.”We hope these visual updates improve your search experience and help you find the information you’re looking for even faster! Let us know your favorite thing about snippets and highlights in the comments below.ResourcesHow content is indexed for search in Guru How Guru’s search works Searching content in Guru

Hello!We are currently looking for customers who are interested in trying out a new feature that will be coming to all Guru customers very soon. We’ve long heard that it would be helpful to have more information per result on the search results page, so we are adding content snippets and highlighting to results. Check out this update from last week to learn more about what’s in progress. What to expect of the Early Access Program (EAP) We’re planning to start the EAP on Monday October 18th It will run until Friday October 22nd (we expect all EAP participants to keep the new functionality while we work to enable it for all customers after that date) The functionality will be enabled for everyone on your Guru team as it’s an account-wide improvement During this time you’ll be able to give us feedback through a new, specific Community forum which will also have more detailed information about the improvement This improvement is for the web app only (we’ll come back to the extension soon!) If this sounds like something your team would like to join, please comment below and we’ll get in touch.Thank you!

As we close in on the final stretch of 2021, our product team at Guru has updated our product roadmap to reflect our product vision for the rest of the year. We revisit the roadmap quarterly, and outline the “big rocks” that we’re most focused on in an interactive webinar with our customers. This roadmap isn’t a guarantee, and doesn’t include every project we’ll tackle in that time frame, but provides a high-level overview of the biggest things on our list. If you missed this quarter’s webinar, never fear! We’ll recap the session below, and you can join us next quarter.Roadmap themeThe theme of our Roadmap for the second half of 2021 is Simplicity. Simplicity is one of our guiding product principles here at Guru, and so we wanted to center our roadmap narrative around how we’re working to make Guru as simple and easy to use as possible.We know that there are many places that knowledge can and does live, so we want to make sure that when you choose to keep it in Guru, that’s an easy choice for you and your users. You'll see the theme of simplicity represented throughout our three persistent Roadmap focus areas. Product focus areasWe like to map out our Roadmap features in the following three areas: Ecosystem, Experience, and Administration. The features in our 2H Roadmap will nest under these themes.Ecosystem: One of our guiding product principles at Guru is "not another destination" — we live in a world of ever-expanding apps, tabs, notifications, and devices, all vying for your attention. Our ecosystem roadmap is all about meeting you and your team, wherever you're working, and helping you be more productive. Experience: Sometimes we focus on new and shiny objects, but as a knowledge product, the core of what we do is pretty simple. It should be easy to write great content, find the content you're looking for, and collaborate with your team. Our emphasis on experience is all about these core experiences. Administration: Another guiding product principle at Guru is to deliver “knowledge management without all the management" — you shouldn't have to spend all your time managing your content, users, and permissions... you should be able to spend your time creating, sharing, and enjoying it. Our administration roadmap is all about making your life easier as an admin or knowledge manager.Ecosystem iPaaS: Zapier & Workato integrationsGuru is great at helping teams manage their knowledge, but oftentimes that knowledge needs to be shared or acted on in different applications. Because our goal with Guru is to make it easy for all teams do their best work, we understand that Guru needs to connect to these other applications that you rely on daily.Through partnerships with Zapier and Workato, you can now build no-code/low-code workflows yourself to ensure that Guru works everywhere you work. The process is simple: identify an event that occurs in one application that you would like to trigger an action in another application. Guru can be the first application or the second. The example shown in this graphic is a Guru-to-Slack workflow: A user is added to a group in Guru, and through a “Zap” or “recipe” set up through Zapier or Workato, some magic happens, and that user is automatically added to a corresponding channel in Slack. Okay, it’s not really magic, but it feels like it!Experience SearchIf you’ve attended a previous roadmap session, you’ll know that search is a permanent fixture on our roadmap. That’s because search is a core tenet of the Guru experience. 40% of the time, the first action a user takes in a Guru session is executing a search. We also know how much powerful search means to you: search is one of our highest feedback areas. We hear you and are committed to improving Guru’s search experience.In recent months, we’ve released updates to make the search results page more useful. You can learn more about these updates in our recent Product update.We have a few more updates to the search results page up our sleeves: We’ll be adding even more details, including content snippets and highlights, to the search results page so that users can more easily understand why specific Cards have been returned. Future search enhancements include more work on semantic search, which gets at the meaning of a user’s query rather than focusing specifically on the exact words, and delivering a new search algorithm that will provide improved handling for punctuation and word spacing issues, a new synonym architecture, and support for new machine learning components. EditorThe editor is also a repeat customer on our roadmap, but this time with a bit of a twist. Because creating and editing knowledge is so important to the foundation of Guru, we are always working on improving this process. In recent months we’ve delivered updates to comments, table formatting, and image uploads. We have more work we’d like to do in these areas, but have reached a place where our current editor framework is holding us back from doing the meaningful work that we know you’re most excited about. That’s why we’ve made the decision to undertake a rewrite of Guru’s editor framework. In order to fully deliver on our desired functionality, it has become necessary to revamp Guru’s editor completely. You can learn more about this work in this Product update. Web app usabilityA new area on this half’s roadmap relates to accessibility and usability. “Ease of use” is a big feedback item, and we hope we’ve mentioned it enough times by now that we want to make Guru as simple and intuitive to use as possible. Accessibility is the practice of making technology usable by as many people as possible, regardless of physical or cognitive disabilities. It’s important to us that Guru be accessible to everyone. We have an engineering pod dedicated to updating our web application to meet accessibility standards, so you may have noticed subtle stylistic changes across the product in recent months.We’re diving even deeper into this work over the rest of the year in order to execute on a number of quick wins throughout the product to meaningfully impact the user experience. Some are such no-brainers that you may not even notice them!Administration Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancementsAnnouncements is an area of Guru that we have been pleasantly surprised and intrigued to observe how our customers use – even in ways we hadn't anticipated. With the rise of hybrid work, we're seeing more and more customers rely on announcements not just to share knowledge, but to help their teams find the signal through the noise. To that end, we want to make it simpler to send and receive announcements in ways that fit into your workflows.First, we’re increasing the flexibility of who you can send announcements to:Adding the ability to send announcements to individual users Allowing you to send a announcement from a private card to a user who has access to that private card Supporting sending a announcement to any group in Guru if the All Members group is permissioned on a given CollectionNext, we’ll be providing increased visibility into announcements:Adding the ability to view “Read” and “Unread” announcements Letting Admins, Collection Owners, and authors on a given Collection see all of the sent announcements from that Collection. Hopefully these updates will make it simpler for you and your team to send and receive announcements.Want to know how you can stay involved with our product team between Roadmap sessions?You’re already doing it by being here! One of the main reasons we do the quarterly Roadmap sessions is to have an open dialogue with our customers about what we’re working on and what excites them most. But that conversation doesn’t need to happen only once a quarter! This Community is how we can best stay in touch with all of you on an ongoing basis.We had a question during our live session about how customers can volunteer to participate in Guru’s Early Access programs, and being active in the Community is the best way to demonstrate your interest to our product team. This is the first place we look for engaged customers to bounce ideas off of, so keep an eye out for future calls-to-action.That's all for our 2H Roadmap update! Thanks for tagging along. We'll revisit the roadmap at the end of the year and provide a new vision for the following six months. See you then!

Hello! We have one last update to close the work week.These changes were released in different stages over the last month and now that everything is complete we wanted to summarize them: Dashboard updatesWe simplified the links in the left-hand column of Guru’s dashboard. We heard your feedback about wanting to see recently viewed cards by default, and took the opportunity to adjust the other links in this menu so that more of what you frequently access is easy to find. With new links to Drafts (if you have permission to author) and Collections right on the web app home page, you’ll be able to get to work faster after opening Guru.  New Dashboard navigation We also moved the infrequently used help links to the avatar menu (your picture in the top right corner), which brings us to our second update: Avatar menu updatesWe’ve grouped related links and updated their names to make it easier for you to locate what you’re looking for. Helpful information like our Help Center, the Guru Academy, the Guru Community, and how to get in touch with our Support team are now all available in one place in this avatar menu.Click on your profile photo at the top right corner to check it out!New avatar menuWe hope you enjoy these small changes, please let us know if you have questions about them. We’re always thinking about ways to make Guru’s dashboard more useful, so stay tuned for future updates! 

Our latest update to improve the user experience in Guru is related to the lists of Cards that appear on the search results page and the dashboard in the web app. When reading lists, it’s important for information to be as scannable as possible. That’s why with this update we’ve reorganized the Card preview: prioritizing the title and verification status, removing the colored Collection icon in favor of displaying the full breadcrumb, and refining font sizes and colors. Here’s a comparison of the changes as they look on the dashboard: Dashboard Card list comparison  On the accessibility side, we’ve improved the ability to navigate Card lists using a keyboard and added information to the HTML structure behind the lists so they are easier to consume through screen readers. This is the first of several updates coming to the search results page over the next few months, be sure to look out for additional updates in this area. Note that you’ll need to refresh any Guru windows you may have open in order to see these changes reflected.We hope you find these changes helpful, please let us know if you have any questions!