Dashboard update: personalized recommendations “Recommended For You”

Hi Guru Community!We’re introducing a new way to help people find information they need to succeed in their jobs. Today, we’re releasing automated, personalized recommendations in a section titled “Recommended For You” on the Guru web app dashboard. Now, when users log into Guru, they’ll see a new section on the dashboard that surfaces Cards based on their activity in Guru and the activity of people like them within your company. These recommendations are unique for every user, and are a great way to keep people continuously connected to useful content. Recommendations will include knowledge that the user may not know exists in Guru, may have not seen in a long time, or may have recently interacted with.Personalized recommendations on the dashboardHere’s how it works:Recommendations will automatically appear when users visit the dashboard.  Users can access up to 15 recommended cards in this section.  Recommendations refresh once a day. Note that a user might not see recommended Cards if they haven’t been active in Guru yet. If a recommendation isn’t helpful you can dismiss it to keep it out of your recommendations for a while.  To help you decide if you'd like to view a recommendation we've included a preview of key information: Name and image of the last person to modify the card Date of the last modification An “Updated" label if the card has been updated in the last 10 days If a user sees a Card that’s interesting, they can click to open it right from the dashboard. Recommendations will improve over time as users interact with Cards while they use Guru in their work, and as the rest of their coworkers also continue to engage with Guru.To learn more, check out the new Personalized Card Recommendations article in Help Center.We’d love to hear your thoughts on this new feature! Please let us know what you think with a comment below.

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Customize your Dashboard with Custom Text and Featured Cards

Hello Guru Community 👋🏽Here’s some exciting news for Guru admins: starting today, you’ll see two new areas on the dashboard where you can include important information to help keep everyone in the company aligned.  This section of the Guru dashboard is purpose-built to give admins the control they need to highlight the most important company-wide information.The custom areas of the dashboard will appear in the right column of the home page (we call this the “Right Rail”). Here’s what’s new: Custom text block widget: Admins can add text to the dashboard to show important company information. Use this area to display a welcome message, show orientation information around what people will find in Guru, or include an executive note on the dashboard. Featured Cards widget: Admins can select Cards to display on the dashboard so people can easily see what’s most important across the company. These Card titles will be visible to everyone logging into Guru, so be sure to select Cards that the “All Members” group can view.  As a reminder, users will also see their unread announcements on the dashboard, along with the newly released “Recommended for You” section, which includes personalized Card recommendations. At Guru, we’re featuring our most recent Knewsletter along with a link to our internal product roadmap so folks can have easy access to the information that keeps every team connected to what’s most important to the company. We’d love to hear how you plan to use these new custom widgets! Leave a comment on this post and let us know how you plan to use this feature.

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Get updates on Cards with Follow a Card

Hello, I hope your week is off to a good start!One of our most-requested features is the ability to subscribe to a Card and get updates when information in that Card changes. At last count, we had 94 upvotes for this idea, so I hope today’s release makes a bunch of your days 😉Starting today, users can follow any Guru Card and automatically receive updates when the information on that Card changes.Readers will feel more secure in knowing when information, processes, and other company knowledge they care about changes. They will have control over how many Cards they follow, so they can manage information overload according to their own appetite for notifications.Authors and leaders have a new way to understand what content is most important to their readers through "Card Follow" stats. This functionality gives them a little peace of mind that their team can keep up to date without authors and leaders having to do extra work.These subject matter experts (SMEs) can also encourage employees to follow specific Cards, relieving SMEs of some of the burden of manually reminding people to read updated Cards. It also reduces the noise of re-sharing the same Cards over and over again in Slack and Teams. Follow a Card and see who is following it.Here’s how it works:When you open a Card in the Guru web app or browser extension, you’ll see a “Follow” button at the upper right hand corner of the Card. Click the “Follow” button, and when the Card is updated, you’ll receive a notification in your channel of choice (Slack, Teams, or email). You can un-follow a Card at any time.Card editors have the ability to select whether or not they want to notify followers of updates made to their Cards. We know that not every edit is worthy of sending out a notification, so we made sure subject matter experts can safely adjust their Cards for typos and format changes without worrying about overloading Card followers with noise. Alongside adding the ability to follow a Card, we’ve also made valuable information found in the Details area of a Card more accessible: now the name and picture of the last person to modify the Card and the timestamp of that update are available in the top utility bar. No more clicking to the Details tab to gain access to this helpful context! We’ve also moved the link to comments over to the right, next to the Follow button to make room for exciting future updates (no spoilers!).To learn more, check out the new Follow a Card article in Help Center.We’ve been using this feature at Guru for a few weeks now, and our most-followed Card recaps all of our product releases from 2022. We’d love to hear what Cards your team is following! Let us know how you’re using the follow a Card feature in the comments below.Happy Halloween! 🎃

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Announcements updates: reminders and improved reader experience

Hey Guru Community!We’re back with a fresh batch of updates to the announcements feature. This time, we’re bringing you more ways to drive readership of announcements, so leaders and experts can be sure their readers are engaging with important information.Note: Announcements are available on Builder plan and above. Today, you’ll see a number of updates: Announcement reminders: If a reader has not yet acknowledged an announcement, a reminder will automatically be sent three calendar days after the initial announcement, nudging them to read and acknowledge it.  This removes the need for the announcement sender to manually follow up, while also helping prioritize the work of the reader. Announcement senders will be able to send a manual reminder. Announcement senders will be able to see when and if a reminder was sent. The reminders feature will be included in the Announcements Insights section, accessible right from the Card, under the original announcement comment.  Dashboard updates: All of the reader's unread announcements from the past 30 days will appear at the top of the dashboard. This will increase the relevance of the highlighted information in the dashboard and create a personalized experience. What’s changing:  The dashboard will include announcements sent to any groups to which the reader belongs (not just company-wide announcements). Only unread announcements from the last 30 days will appear on the dashboard. That means if a user is up-to-date on reading their recent announcements, this area will be collapsed on their dashboard. Users can still find their read announcements and those older than 30 days by clicking through to their tasks. Company-wide announcements will no longer be pinned to the dashboard once they’re read. We’ll be launching a new feature next month that will allow admins to pin Cards to the dashboard, so stay tuned!  Email notifications: Emails now come from the announcement sender (instead of coming from Guru), and contain the title of the announcement Card in the email subject These emails will also show the profile pic of the announcement sender in the email along with a read time estimate for the announcement Card. These improvements are intended to help contextualize and personalize notifications while helping readers prioritize what announcements to read first.  Slack and MS Teams notifications: Announcement notifications now show the profile pic of the announcement sender and provide a read time estimate for the announcement Card. These improvements are intended to help personalize notifications while helping readers prioritize what announcements to read first. Slack notification updates have been live to all users as of September 26, 2022, and MS Teams notification updates have been live to all users as of October 3, 2022. We’d love to hear how you’re using announcements with your teams! Post your thoughts in this thread, or head to the Product Feedback section to share your ideas.

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Knowledge Fest Keynote: What’s Next for Guru

Hi Guru Community! It was so exciting to participate in Knowledge Fest last week. And it wasn’t just because I had a chance to discuss Guru’s product vision with you–I was also able to learn directly from customers like you. I attended several sessions where members of the Guru Community shared their best practices around knowledge management and internal communications. It was amazing to see how they are embracing the opportunities presented by the new world of work, and I’m inspired by their wisdom.I know that many of you were unable to attend Knowledge Fest, so I wanted to share a recording of the Keynote Presentation here in the Product Updates section.   In this presentation, Rick Nucci, Guru’s co-founder and CEO; Mitch Stewart, Guru’s co-founder and CTO; and I share Guru’s vision for the future of work. During my section, I talk about some of the new ways we’re building Guru to make information easy to find, in your workflow, and trusted.What does that mean to you? Well, it means we’re investing in several exciting new product areas: Recommended content, so people find knowledge they didn’t even know existed Surfacing insights in Slack, so you can turn your chat app into a knowledge goldmine Customize and personalize Guru for your company, team, and role in new and exciting ways I hope you’re as excited as I am about these upcoming features! 

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New: filters for search results in the web app

Hi everyone, We’re very happy to announce the release of filters for search results in the Guru web app! This is a feature that you’ve requested, so it’s extra-fun for us to let you know this enhancement is live. Now, when you use the search function in the web app, you’ll see a variety of filter options on the right side of your search results. This update makes filtering search results faster and more intuitive. You can now filter your results by:Collections: you’ll be able select multiple options from the Collections where matches were found. Tags: select multiple options from the top 100 tags found on Cards in the search results. Author: see Cards written by a specific person. Verified cards: see only Cards that are verified. Favorites: see only Cards that you’ve favorited (this is a pre-existing feature that has been moved into the new experience). Ready to give it a try? Here’s how it works:Type your search terms in the search bar and hit enter. On the search results page, choose as many filters as you want to target what you’re looking for. Results will automatically appear as you select filters, and filter options will automatically update as you make selections. Easily clear results by de-selecting individual filters or using the “Clear all” button. Want more white space to see search results? You can hide the filters menu.In addition to these new filters, very (very) soon you’ll also have the ability to save or share a filtered search by bookmarking or sharing the URL of the search results page. You may have noticed this previously worked for searches filtered by tag, once this update is released all of the new filters will also be part of the URL 😄. Note, if you share a URL for your own filtered results with someone else, their permissions will determine what results they see, not yours. Learn more about search filters in the Guru Help Center. Happy searching!

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Announcements updates: new options for tracking engagement, commenting, and notifications

Hi Guru Community 👋🏻 For the past weeks, we’ve been learning about the exciting ways customers are using announcements in Guru. We’ve seen how important it is for the leaders and execs who send announcements to see how their teams are connecting with the information they share. That’s why we’re releasing a series of enhancements to announcements that will help you see and understand engagement. Note: Announcements are available on Builder plan and above. Here’s what’s new for you starting today:  See announcement engagement on the Card: Beneath the announcement comment, you’ll see engagement stats. Quickly see the read rate percentage for the announcement (“read rate” is the percentage of people who’ve clicked the “I Read It” button that appears on the announcement). Clicking the read rate text will show expanded engagement information: read rate, open rate, and the names of all users who have received the announcement and whether or not they’ve read it. Before this release, individuals that sent announcements had to manually download engagement stats. Now, all Guru users can see these stats, whether or not they’re the person who sent the announcement. This increases transparency and lets stakeholders at all levels see engagement on announcements. First-time engagement notification: Users who send announcements will get an email, Slack, or Teams message (based on individual user settings) the first time someone reads their announcement. This shows that the announcement is active and people are starting to read it. This notification will include an option to “see more insights”. This will bring the user to the comments section of the announcement Card, where they can see full engagement stats as described above. See announcement text as a comment: When a user sends an announcement, the text they use for that announcement will be added to the Card as a comment. Everyone viewing comments on the Card will see that it was sent as an announcement, along with the time-bound context around that announcement. React to announcements and comments: Users will be able to react to Card comments with an emoji. This includes the announcement text, which now permanently appears as a Card comment. Reactions let stakeholders know how people are feeling about the communications they receive, establishing a feedback loop between announcers and readers.  We appreciate all the customer feedback we’ve gotten on announcements so far, and we’d love to hear how you’re using them at your company! Post your thoughts in this thread, or head to the Product Feedback section to share your ideas.

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Update Guru Cards with Slack Messages

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.

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Re-introducing search in Boards, and introducing search in Collections

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.

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Reinstall the Guru Slack app: Better link unfurls today, more exciting improvements soon!

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!

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Introducing Company-wide Announcements on the Dashboard

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 

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Updated Navigation for Guru’s web app

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:

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New Card Insights: See how many Guru Cards link to any given Card

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!

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Expanding on-Card breadcrumbs to improve knowledge navigation

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!

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A Major Machine Learning Update for Search

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!  

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1H 2022 Product Roadmap Update

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.

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2021 Q4 Community Feedback Review

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! 

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Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancements: Improving visibility and send-ability

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!

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New search algorithm - a solid foundation for the future

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 :)

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Content import updates: new source options, better progress visibility, and clearer messaging

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.

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