Product updates

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!

Hi everyone! We’re excited to share our latest improvements to the Users, Groups, and Collections pages in Team Settings, that was raised here in the Guru community last week. You can now easily filter and sort on these pages to quickly find the users, groups, or Collections you’re looking for. No more excessive scrolling! These updates also include accessibility enhancements to make Guru more usable for everyone. We hope you enjoy this change - let us know what you think!

BIG NEWS​ Thanks to Zapier, Workato, and webhooks, you can create automated workflows in Guru.  You can connect with Guru once and integrate everywhere, ensuring that no matter where or when your team is working, they all have equal access to the information they need right within whichever tools they need it in.Get ready to build the future of collaboration with us. Read more about the new possibilities here. Build With Us: Automate Workflows With Guru’s Zapier & Workato Apps | Guru

Every quarter, we update Guru’s Product Roadmap to look out over the next ~6 months and outline the “big rocks” that our product teams are focusing on. 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. We present this roadmap to customers in “formal” updates bi-annually that cover 1H and 2H respectively, (well, nothing is ever very “formal” at Guru), and we hold informal check-ins in the interim. The most recent check-in was our Q2 Roadmap session and Happy Hour. Let’s revisit what was covered. Roadmap themesOur product vision at Guru is focused around three key themes, and each “big rock” project falls into one: ecosystem, experience, and administration.               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 our attention. Guru’s 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.  EcosystemZapier and Workato integrations - Zapier and Workato are integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), and they integrate with 3,000+ applications that we all use to work every day. We know that knowledge doesn't begin and end in Guru; there are workflows that involve other applications and other notification mechanisms, and we are excited to continue to bring the knowledge you need to do your best work into any form or location that you need it. Growing businesses can use Zapier to automate processes between applications, like Guru and any other app you use to do your best work, and Workato does the same for larger businesses.Please note: The Zapier and Workato integrations are still currently in beta, but will be released very soon! ExperienceSearch experience - Improving our search experience is something that is always top of mind for us at Guru. We are working to enhance search relevancy so that you can find what you're looking for with less effort. Specific updates to search performance include better handling of spelling errors in queries, showing recent searches, and reducing the time to return results.Collaboration - Collaboration is key to creating knowledge in Guru, and we are committed to making it easier to communicate about knowledge in Guru. We have recently released updates to comments that make them contextual (visible alongside Card content), resolvable (dismiss comments that have been acted on), and threadable (reply directly to a comment when appropriate rather than posting a new comment). In the future, we’ll set our sights on enabling in-line commenting.Editor - Our goal is to upgrade Guru's editor experience to improve performance and reliability around image uploads, tables, and other top customer requests. We recently released updates to usability of table column resizing, improving attempts to automatically host uploaded images natively in Guru, and linking to sections! Next we look ahead to leveling-up Slate, the underlying editor technology in order to iterate on that solid foundation. AdministrationReal-time notifications - To make it easier to collaborate and act on knowledge in Guru, we are refactoring our notifications to add stability and scalability to real-time delivery. Users may be used to refreshing the web app to see up-to-date notifications, and soon those notifications will appear automatically, no refresh required. We have already released updates for Knowledge Alerts, Questions, and Mentions, and are tackling the other 'My Tasks' areas shortly. This work will also help us build more advanced notification features in the future. Future Roadmap updatesKeep an eye out for our next Roadmap update covering the second half of 2021! Hope to see you there.

Over the past few months, we've made several significant improvements to the editing experience. In particular, we’ve provided more options when creating and editing cards, which we understand are critical for many teams like yours.  These improvements include: Resizing table columns Resolving comments Replying to comments  Resizing Table ColumnsTable columns can be resized by dragging the right edge of the column. The table will expand or shrink as you adjust the columns’ widths. Once the card is saved, tables will be centered on the card. Columns will remain the width you set, regardless of the browser’s size. If the table is wider than the browser, a horizontal scrollbar will display.Check out this gif:Table column resizing Resolving Comments and Replying to CommentsWe’re enhancing comments to improve collaboration within cards. Recently, we’ve added the ability to resolve comments as well as reply to comments.Resolving comments allows you to differentiate open comments from resolved comments. By default, all new comments are open comments. Now you can "resolve" the comment to move it from open to resolved, essentially indicating the comment as "done" or "addressed.” Likewise, you can re-open resolved comments.Sometimes if there’s a lot of discussion on a card, it may be unclear, possibly frustrating, trying to follow the flow of a conversation when each reply is a new comment. We’ve added comment replies which now display replies as a thread. We anticipate these two enhancements will help make collaboration and conversations better and easier in Guru going forward!Check out these screenshots: Resolving comments Reopening resolved comments Replying to commentsFor more information on comments, see our Help Center article!

As the admin for your team’s Guru account, we want you to have a smooth and transparent experience in every area of the product. With that in mind, we’ve recently made some significant improvements to our subscription and billing system. Guru admins can now: See your plan and team information in a new, clearer layout Upgrade your pricing plan directly in Guru Customize invoices to your needs, by adding billing email contacts or PO numbers  See your plan and team information in a new, clearer layoutYour team’s billing information has also gotten a refresh to make it easier to assess your plan information, team summary, billing summary, and past invoices – all at a quick glance. Understanding exactly what you’re paying for should be a piece of cake. See more detail here. Upgrade your plan directly in GuruYou now have the ability to upgrade your pricing plan directly within Guru, instead of having to reach out to our team. Unlock new features in higher pricing tiers whenever your team is ready to level up. Just navigate to the Billing page in Settings, and click Change Plan. See details here. Customize invoices to suit your needsWe added more ways for admins to customize invoices to your company’s needs, by adding fields for additional billing email addresses, as well as PO numbers. To do so, just navigate to your Billing Page and select Update Payment Method under Plan details. See more detail here.Please let us know if you have questions about these improvements!