Our release notes highlight the most impactful updates to our platform, including new features, major improvements, and changes that directly enhance your experience. Think of this page as your go-to summary of what's new, what's changed, and how it benefits you.
August 6, 2025
Temporary Access Pass (TAP) Support for Azure Labs
To align with Microsoft’s upcoming enforcement of multi-factor authentication (MFA) on September 30, 2025, Skillable has implemented support for Temporary Access Pass (TAP) across Azure Cloud Slice labs. TAP is a Microsoft-supported authentication method that enables secure, time-limited access without relying on a traditional password.
This feature ensures that temporary users can continue accessing Azure environments within labs, even after password-only logins are disabled.
Key details:
• Provides users with a short, time-limited code that replaces a password during sign-in
• Automatically generates TAP codes for learners in Azure Cloud Slice labs
• Ensures compatibility with Microsoft’s Azure MFA requirements and maintains seamless lab access
• TAP support is currently available for Azure Cloud Slice labs, including configurations using Hyper-V and ESX
• Support for Azure Virtualization labs is planned and coming soon
If you are currently using Azure Cloud Slice labs, please contact your Technical Success Manager to begin planning how to use this feature and ensure continued access for your learners without disruption.
July 14, 2025
Insights Portal
The Skillable Insights portal has been refreshed to help decision-makers access, navigate and act on lab data more efficiently. This update enhances usability across dashboards, reports, and invoicing.
Purpose
The purpose of the Insights Portal Refresh is to simplify how you discover, interpret and manage lab data while empowering you to make more informed decisions through better reporting and visibility.
Key Elements
- Redesigned Reports Page: Includes image previews and clearer descriptions to help users find the right report faster.
- Updated Reports: The Creator Metrics and Consumer Metrics reports have been enhanced with improved data sources, providing even more accurate and reliable insights into lab engagement and performance.
- Enhanced Dashboard Visuals: A centralized view of lab usage, learner engagement, and top-performing labs.
- Streamlined Invoicing: Access and download up to two years of invoices—PDFs, summaries, and detailed Excel files—from a single tab.
- Power BI Integration: Interactive filters and visualizations allow for deeper exploration of lab performance directly within the portal.
For more information, check out our documentation.
June 24, 2025
AI Vision Activities
AI Vision, a new activity type in Skillable Studio, helps lab builders create high-quality, performance-based activities. Lab builders can leverage AI-powered computer vision technology to create natural language prompts that verify, based on the user’s screen, whether the user has successfully completed an activity or set of activities within the lab.
Purpose
- Reduces technical skills required to create a scored activity. (No need to write scripts.)
- Enables builders to check for the outcomes that matter. (No more false negatives due to misspelled cell headers.)
- Supports more environments and software types. (Measure what's on a user's screen, without worrying about whether the software has an API to call.)
Key Elements
- Prompt: Allows the lab author to create a prompt using natural language. This prompt determines what the computer vision technology will check on the user's screen.
- Test Prompt: Enables the lab author to test a prompt using a 1-5 star rating and AI-generated feedback to help the lab author improve the prompt strength and clarity.
- Reference Image (Optional): Adds a reference image of the correct answer to further guide the computer vision technology to check the user's screen.
- Evaluation/Scoring: Uses computer vision to check the user's screen when they click Check/Score in the lab, evaluating whether it matches the prompt and, if provided, the reference image.
We recommend that you consult with your psychometrician before including AI Vision Activities in high-stakes scenario assessments.
For more information, check out our documentation.
Activity Group Scoring
Activity Group Scoring is a new type of lab passing policy designed to provide a more structured method for assessing and scoring labs. Activity Groups often represent Tasks (as might appear on a job description, Job Task Analysis, or skill framework) or Learning Objectives (as might appear in curriculum design.) Activity Group Scoring allows a lab builder to set a passing policy at both the activity group and lab levels, giving organizations more granular data about which tasks or learning objectives a learner has mastered.
Purpose
The purpose of Activity Group Scoring is to provide a way to assess and score multiple activities as a single unit, making it easier to assess a learner's mastery.
Key Elements
- Scoring Mode Selection: Choose between scoring individual activities or scoring activities as a group.
- Scoring Results Display Type Selection: Decide how scoring results are shown based on the selected scoring mode.
- Confirmation Dialog: Confirm changes when switching scoring modes.
- Management Dialog: Manage properties of activity groups, including enabling scoring and setting passing scores.
- Alerts and Notices: Display alerts and notices related to scoring, such as warnings for unscored activities.
For more information, check out our documentation.
Scaled Scoring
Scaled scoring is a crucial concept in standardized testing, ensuring accurate comparisons and fairness. This method is essential for high-stakes exams, where maintaining consistent standards across different test versions is paramount.
Scaled scoring adjusts raw scores to a common scale, often ranging from 0 to 1000 points. This adjustment ensures that scores are comparable across different versions of a test or assessment, even if the difficulty or content varies. For example, if one version of a test is slightly harder than another, scaled scoring helps to balance the scores so that they can be fairly compared.
Key Benefits
- Consistency: Maintains the “bar” at the same place, ensuring that the difficulty level remains consistent across different test versions.
- Fairness: By adjusting for variations in test difficulty, scaled scores provide a fair comparison of candidates’ performance, regardless of which version of the test they took.
- Accuracy: Accounts for slight differences in test difficulty, leading to more accurate assessments of candidates’ abilities.
- Standardization: Enables standardized reporting of scores, which is crucial for institutions and organizations that rely on these scores for decision-making.
For more information, check out our documentation.
Instruction File Import tool
The Instruction File Import tool dramatically reduces the time it takes to build out lab instructions by allowing users to import existing Word, RTF, or Markdown documents—including those with dozens of images—directly into the Instructions Editor. Instead of copying and pasting content or manually uploading individual images, lab authors can now import and organize full documents in just a few clicks. This results in significant time savings and a smoother content creation experience.
Purpose
The purpose of Instruction File Import is to help lab authors efficiently reuse existing content and eliminate time-consuming formatting or manual copy/paste steps—freeing them up to focus on instructional quality.
Key Benefits
- File Compatibility: Import .docx, .rtf, and .md files directly into your lab instructions.
- Image Support: Import images from uploaded documents, with the ability to import multiple images per file.
- Upload Files: Drop in files from your File Explorer.
- Multi-File Handling: Upload and arrange multiple files at once and drag files around to re-order.
- Markdown Conversion: Automatically convert all content to Markdown and insert it at your cursor's location.
- Preview & Edit: Review the imported Markdown content instantly and make any final tweaks before publishing.
For more information, check out our documentation.
March 31, 2025
User Dashboard
The Dashboard in Skillable Studio has been updated to improve productivity and display information that helps to make informed decisions with lab building and lab management.
Some key features include:
- Quick actions: access the most used actions in Studio, based on your usage activity.
- Lab Advisor: the top four recommendations for your labs, sorted by criticality and the number of impacted labs. Additional Lab Advisor data can be viewed by selecting the Lab Advisor from the User Dashboard.
- Lab Grid: quickly search for Favorites, Lab Instances and recent Lab Profiles.
For more information about the User Dashboard, check out our documentation.
Instructions Editor Code-only mode
The code-only Instructions editor has been updated to utilize the ribbon bar while using Markdown format to write lab instructions. This provides quick and easy access to formatting tools, so that you can stay focused on creating hands-on content.
For more information about the Instruction Editor, check out our documentation.
Override Theme at Launch Time
When launching a lab in Studio, lab authors can now optionally select a theme for that lab instance. This allows lab authors to test their labs with different themes to ensure that it is displayed properly while being styled by the selected theme.
Themes are chosen by clicking the theme button next to the launch button. A simple search dialog will appear and allow a theme to be searched for and selected. The selected theme will only apply to this launch, and subsequent launches will continue to use the default theme that is configured on the Lab Profile.
For more information about overriding Themes at launch, check out our documentation.
Revert Virtual Machine via API (Beta)
Our Lab API has been updated to enable virtual machines in hands-on labs to be reverted to a previous state. This feature allows instructors and administrators to assist students in restoring their VMs as needed. This API endpoint is currently in beta, if you would like access to this endpoint, please reach out to your CSM.
March 25, 2025
Custom Virtual Machine Endpoints (Beta)
The Custom Virtual Machine (VM) Endpoint feature optimizes access to VM endpoints within lab environments by eliminating the need for intermediary VMs to connect to VM endpoints. This enhancement allows users to seamlessly connect to terminals, web applications, containers, services, and other configurations on a VM that traditionally required direct login to access.
The Custom VM Endpoints feature significantly improves VM management efficiency and security, making lab environments more user-friendly and effective. In this initial release, we support SSH, RDP, HTTP and HTTPS connections, with plans to extend support to VNC in future updates.
Additional key features include:
- Multi-Endpoint Support: Define multiple endpoints on a single VM.
- Tab-Based UI: Each endpoint is displayed as a separate tab within the lab interface, making it simple to switch between endpoints and removing errors when entering login credentials.
- Persistent Connections: Maintain active sessions while switching between endpoints.
- Secure Access: Uses an internal secure network for web traffic and a proxy for HTTP endpoints.
- Nested VM Support: Enables interaction with child VMs hosted inside a parent VM.
For more information about configuring and using Custom VM Endpoints, check out our documentation. This feature is currently in beta and we appreciate your feedback as we continue to refine and improve this feature. If you would like to provide feedback, please do so within the Lab Profile in Skillable Studio on the Virtual Machines tab.