Skip to main content
featured-image
featured-image
featured-image
featured-image

Custom colors: make Guru feel more like you!

Hey Guru Community 👋 I’m excited to share the news that companies on our Builder plan and above can now customize the colors in their Guru instance, right from within the Guru app. We’ve heard from communications leaders and execs that it’s important for their company-wide apps to look and feel consistent. Now, admins can control the appearance of Guru to make our app feel more like your company. Here’s how it works: Under "Customization" in Team Settings, Admins have the ability to edit the team name, add a team logo, and create a custom color theme.  Click the “apply a custom theme” button, and you’ll see options to enter a hex code for three areas: Background (menu background color) Accent (highlight and overlay color) Text and icons (color of text and icons in the menu area) As you enter hex code values, the app will automatically update with the colors you have chosen. If you pick a color combination that does not meet accessibility standards, you’ll see a warning message. Click “update theme” to accept changes.  You can go back and edit your colors or restore Guru’s default color scheme at any time.  Learn more about this feature in the Help Center. Are you planning to customize colors in Guru? Drop a comment below–we’d love to hear from you!

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsGuru AdministrationUser Experience
featured-image
featured-image
featured-image

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.

Related products:User Experience
featured-image

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.

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsUser Experience
featured-image

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! 🎃

Related products:Card CreationAnalyticsUser Experience
featured-image

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.

Related products:Apps and IntegrationsKnowledge Management ToolsUser Experience
featured-image

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! 

Related products:Apps and IntegrationsUser Experience
featured-image

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!

Related products:Navigation and Search
featured-image

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.

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsUser Experience
featured-image

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.

Related products:Apps and Integrations

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.

Related products:Navigation and SearchUser Experience

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!

Related products:Apps and Integrations
featured-image

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 

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsUser Experience
featured-image
featured-image

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:

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsNavigation and SearchUser Experience
featured-image

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!

Related products:Knowledge Management ToolsGuru Administration

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!

Related products:Navigation and SearchUser Experience