"We were ready for a pandemic before we even knew there was going to be one.”
Sara Davatelis and her team at SailPoint spent most of 2019 modernizing their tech stack. Launching Slack and Zoom in early 2019, they knew they needed to tie their tool stack together with a knowledge management solution—but not just any old silo. Instead, they wanted something that could help their quickly growing company of 1,200 employees across four different countries collaborate across their tool stack in a fluid and dynamic way.
Now, seemingly overnight, our new remote working reality has made communication, collaboration, and connectedness more important than ever. At Guru, our mission in support of customers like SailPoint has always been “the knowledge you need to do your job should find you where you need it,” and now that “where you need it” means the kitchen counter, a desk that you share with your homeschooling child, or your parents’ guest bedroom, that mission has become a must.
“For us, the stay at home order was kind of a seamless transition. The only thing that really changed with the way people were working was where they were physically sitting.”
As we’ve evolved as a company, so has the way our customers use Guru. With the pains of siloed information, team-specific tools, and non-integrated workflows being felt even more acutely now that we’re all working from home, teams like SailPoint are starting to work across every team in Guru. For many teams like SailPoint, Guru is that cross-departmental connective tissue—a single source of truth that spans working groups and home offices.
“Before mid-March, we had about 30,000 Slack messages a day, across the 1,000+ employees that we have in Slack. The day that the stay-at-home order went into effect in Austin in Mid-March, we saw an immediate jump to 60,000+ messages a day. That’s 30,000 conversations, shoulder taps, chit chats that were going on physically in the office that overnight went to Slack. [...] [People] don’t want to repeat themselves in Slack, so they make Cards for information. As an Admin, it was really nice to see just how easy it was for everyone to transition into this new way of living.
– Sara Davatelis, Data Warehouse Analyst @ SailPoint
We know that knowledge is the lifeblood of any organization, and we want to make it easier than ever to connect every team across your company—regardless of what they’re working on or where they’re doing it—through knowledge in Guru.
Check out how our latest product updates will help your organization work together while apart:
The tl;dr on how Guru keeps you connected
Building a knowledge-driven culture: Guru helps unite your team around knowledge and build a culture of collaboration—even when your teams are distributed—to improve business outcomes
Adapting to every one of your team’s needs: Guru’s API makes for a seamless connection with any application, making Guru work however and wherever you want it to. New personal Card curation and drafting functionality will allow users to optimize their own knowledge workflows
Working everywhere you do: Learn about our new Microsoft Teams app, Slack integration, dynamic emails, and mobile app functionality
Adapting to your needs
Guru’s API
While Guru is often the “connective tissue” of entire organizations, we also recognize not every team will want to work in Guru—or even document knowledge in our app. That’s why, from day one, we’ve made sure Guru wasn’t just another destination, but instead designed to bring the knowledge every team needs into the workflows they’ve already established.
Guru’s API takes “living where you work” to the next level. Having previously founded Boomi, one of the first integration platforms as a service, Guru’s founding team has always been laser focused on the extensibility of Guru, and the goal of integrating our solution into every platform where people work drives a lot of our decision making. That includes strengthening our API offering, which is now available to all accounts on our Builder, Expert, and Enterprise paid plans.
With the ability to connect Guru to any web-based solution used by any of your teams, your knowledge base can become an org-wide asset and competitive differentiator. Discover the extensibility of Guru’s API by building custom solutions, automating workflows, and ingraining verified knowledge into your company’s culture to help all of your teams work more efficiently.
Customers that are taking advantage of Guru’s API have used it to:
Pull Guru analytics into their business intelligence tools to provide insight into how knowledge impacts their team’s performance
Create custom syncs to and from external knowledge sources
Extend Guru into existing workflows for publishing knowledge, automating content creation, or triggering knowledge
“It is fantastic to have the right information when you need it – but if you aren’t sure what you are looking for, it’s like the information doesn’t exist at all. We spent around 8 hours of engineering effort to sync all markdown files from GitHub to Guru as a side project. We believe Guru should be the place where you can start all of your questions - we aim to ensure that either the answer is in Guru or a useful link to the Source-of-Truth is there.”
Interested in going a step further and creating a Guru integration directly into your own product offering? We have a Developer Network that allows software providers to create their own developer accounts to build integrations using Guru’s API.
MaestroQA, a customer service quality assurance application, leveraged our Developer Network to build an integration that connects our two solutions, recommending relevant content from Guru directly within MaestroQA’s platform to more effectively coach support agents on how to improve their skills. Learn how to integrate Guru into your team’s MaestroQA account, or check out Guru’s Developer Network for more information on integrating Guru into your own product offering.
Organizing Favorites
While you’ve always been able to favorite Cards for quick access, you can now organize those favorite Cards into personal lists. Allow everyone to tailor your team’s knowledge to their needs by arranging any Cards, regardless of author or Collection, into their own personal lists.
“Favorites lists allow me to filter down the huge amount of available information on Guru across so many teams into a more concentrated list of just the hits and lets me find my daily-use information faster so I can move on to the next task.”
– Shane Springer, Solutions Architect @ Zoom Video Communications
Customizing your Guru experience to fit your personal workflows is like making situational shortcuts for yourself. Now that we’re all working remotely, I’ve found myself returning to a different set of Cards over and over again. I curated a WFH list of Cards from our People Ops Collection, Wellness Collection, and IT Collection that I can easily access from my favorites list when I need to troubleshoot my home wifi or want to do an in-home yoga class. Whether you’re gathering Cards to prep for a meeting or saving ones that were helpful in winning a new account, creating a list out of them will save you time the next time that situation arises.
Drafts
Create knowledge before you’re ready to share it with new drafting functionality in Guru. Users will soon be able to save their progress in personal drafts when creating Cards so that they can easily return to them later. This feature will help knowledge creators build content in tandem and then publish it all at once when they’re ready.
“The PetDesk product team will definitely benefit from drafts in Guru! We can better manage new product and feature releases by creating overview cards for our Sales and CS teams, but then work through the content regarding ever-changing elements during the development process for the new feature.... publishing cards when we have everything through QA and have confidence in all details of the release.”
Drafts will be made available in the coming weeks!
Working everywhere you do
Microsoft Teams
Staying connected across departments and time zones is a breeze with Microsoft Teams. And now, sharing knowledge will be a breeze too thanks to Guru’s new Microsoft Teams integration. Teams is one of the fastest growing communication platforms, and we are so excited to bring the power of verified knowledge directly to the Teams experience.
Teams users will soon be able to search for and share Guru Cards, verify knowledge, receive announcements, and reply directly to comments in Guru—all without leaving the Teams chat interface. We know how much time you spend in your chat tool everyday, so we don’t want you to have to leave your workflow to use and manage knowledge.
"Our company is now shifting entirely to Microsoft Teams and having the integration with Guru would be a game changer for us! There's unlimited potential for the end users being able to communicate Guru knowledge within their chat—especially now that people are speaking to each other across the globe. It's also going to really help with knowledge sharing across the company and best practices."
– Brantley Merritt, Global Learning & Development @ ServiceSource
Guru notification emails are getting an upgrade. We’re excited to partner with Google to leverage their dynamic email capabilities, which will make our emails more actionable and useful for customers. Now, users can take more actions on Guru content directly from Gmail. Actions include expanding Card content, commenting functionality, and the ability to verify knowledge, all from within our email digest. These updates will help users manage knowledge within their existing workflows, no context switching required.
Guru Customers that have both email notifications enabled in Guru and “dynamic email” enabled in Gmail should already be seeing these updates. If you don’t have “dynamic email” enabled, visit your Gmail settings to turn it on.
Guru for mobile
Finding and using knowledge on the go is easy with Guru’s iOS and Android mobile apps. Whether you’re en route to a big meeting, or your roommate is slowing down the wifi by streaming a workout class, verified knowledge is always available on your iPhone or Android device. To help you stay connected to your knowledge base at all times, we’re redoubling our mobile efforts in the coming months to make our mobile apps more dynamic and actionable. Look out for improved knowledge sharing and searching functionality in the near future.
Unite your entire team with knowledge
Working from home during a global pandemic is hard enough; don’t let siloed knowledge and disparate solutions make it harder. When your entire organization has access to verified knowledge everywhere they work, cross-departmental collaboration becomes simple.
“As an admin, it was really nice to see just how easy it was for everyone to transition into this new way of living.”
– Sara Davatelis, Data Warehouse Analyst @ SailPoint
Guru’s newest product updates are aimed to connect teams and operationalize org-wide knowledge. Check out Guru’s free Starter plan and education services to get up and running quickly in order to empower your remote teams with collaborative knowledge management.
"We were ready for a pandemic before we even knew there was going to be one.”
Sara Davatelis and her team at SailPoint spent most of 2019 modernizing their tech stack. Launching Slack and Zoom in early 2019, they knew they needed to tie their tool stack together with a knowledge management solution—but not just any old silo. Instead, they wanted something that could help their quickly growing company of 1,200 employees across four different countries collaborate across their tool stack in a fluid and dynamic way.
Now, seemingly overnight, our new remote working reality has made communication, collaboration, and connectedness more important than ever. At Guru, our mission in support of customers like SailPoint has always been “the knowledge you need to do your job should find you where you need it,” and now that “where you need it” means the kitchen counter, a desk that you share with your homeschooling child, or your parents’ guest bedroom, that mission has become a must.
“For us, the stay at home order was kind of a seamless transition. The only thing that really changed with the way people were working was where they were physically sitting.”
As we’ve evolved as a company, so has the way our customers use Guru. With the pains of siloed information, team-specific tools, and non-integrated workflows being felt even more acutely now that we’re all working from home, teams like SailPoint are starting to work across every team in Guru. For many teams like SailPoint, Guru is that cross-departmental connective tissue—a single source of truth that spans working groups and home offices.
“Before mid-March, we had about 30,000 Slack messages a day, across the 1,000+ employees that we have in Slack. The day that the stay-at-home order went into effect in Austin in Mid-March, we saw an immediate jump to 60,000+ messages a day. That’s 30,000 conversations, shoulder taps, chit chats that were going on physically in the office that overnight went to Slack. [...] [People] don’t want to repeat themselves in Slack, so they make Cards for information. As an Admin, it was really nice to see just how easy it was for everyone to transition into this new way of living.
– Sara Davatelis, Data Warehouse Analyst @ SailPoint
We know that knowledge is the lifeblood of any organization, and we want to make it easier than ever to connect every team across your company—regardless of what they’re working on or where they’re doing it—through knowledge in Guru.
Check out how our latest product updates will help your organization work together while apart:
The tl;dr on how Guru keeps you connected
Building a knowledge-driven culture: Guru helps unite your team around knowledge and build a culture of collaboration—even when your teams are distributed—to improve business outcomes
Adapting to every one of your team’s needs: Guru’s API makes for a seamless connection with any application, making Guru work however and wherever you want it to. New personal Card curation and drafting functionality will allow users to optimize their own knowledge workflows
Working everywhere you do: Learn about our new Microsoft Teams app, Slack integration, dynamic emails, and mobile app functionality
Adapting to your needs
Guru’s API
While Guru is often the “connective tissue” of entire organizations, we also recognize not every team will want to work in Guru—or even document knowledge in our app. That’s why, from day one, we’ve made sure Guru wasn’t just another destination, but instead designed to bring the knowledge every team needs into the workflows they’ve already established.
Guru’s API takes “living where you work” to the next level. Having previously founded Boomi, one of the first integration platforms as a service, Guru’s founding team has always been laser focused on the extensibility of Guru, and the goal of integrating our solution into every platform where people work drives a lot of our decision making. That includes strengthening our API offering, which is now available to all accounts on our Builder, Expert, and Enterprise paid plans.
With the ability to connect Guru to any web-based solution used by any of your teams, your knowledge base can become an org-wide asset and competitive differentiator. Discover the extensibility of Guru’s API by building custom solutions, automating workflows, and ingraining verified knowledge into your company’s culture to help all of your teams work more efficiently.
Customers that are taking advantage of Guru’s API have used it to:
Pull Guru analytics into their business intelligence tools to provide insight into how knowledge impacts their team’s performance
Create custom syncs to and from external knowledge sources
Extend Guru into existing workflows for publishing knowledge, automating content creation, or triggering knowledge
“It is fantastic to have the right information when you need it – but if you aren’t sure what you are looking for, it’s like the information doesn’t exist at all. We spent around 8 hours of engineering effort to sync all markdown files from GitHub to Guru as a side project. We believe Guru should be the place where you can start all of your questions - we aim to ensure that either the answer is in Guru or a useful link to the Source-of-Truth is there.”
Interested in going a step further and creating a Guru integration directly into your own product offering? We have a Developer Network that allows software providers to create their own developer accounts to build integrations using Guru’s API.
MaestroQA, a customer service quality assurance application, leveraged our Developer Network to build an integration that connects our two solutions, recommending relevant content from Guru directly within MaestroQA’s platform to more effectively coach support agents on how to improve their skills. Learn how to integrate Guru into your team’s MaestroQA account, or check out Guru’s Developer Network for more information on integrating Guru into your own product offering.
Organizing Favorites
While you’ve always been able to favorite Cards for quick access, you can now organize those favorite Cards into personal lists. Allow everyone to tailor your team’s knowledge to their needs by arranging any Cards, regardless of author or Collection, into their own personal lists.
“Favorites lists allow me to filter down the huge amount of available information on Guru across so many teams into a more concentrated list of just the hits and lets me find my daily-use information faster so I can move on to the next task.”
– Shane Springer, Solutions Architect @ Zoom Video Communications
Customizing your Guru experience to fit your personal workflows is like making situational shortcuts for yourself. Now that we’re all working remotely, I’ve found myself returning to a different set of Cards over and over again. I curated a WFH list of Cards from our People Ops Collection, Wellness Collection, and IT Collection that I can easily access from my favorites list when I need to troubleshoot my home wifi or want to do an in-home yoga class. Whether you’re gathering Cards to prep for a meeting or saving ones that were helpful in winning a new account, creating a list out of them will save you time the next time that situation arises.
Drafts
Create knowledge before you’re ready to share it with new drafting functionality in Guru. Users will soon be able to save their progress in personal drafts when creating Cards so that they can easily return to them later. This feature will help knowledge creators build content in tandem and then publish it all at once when they’re ready.
“The PetDesk product team will definitely benefit from drafts in Guru! We can better manage new product and feature releases by creating overview cards for our Sales and CS teams, but then work through the content regarding ever-changing elements during the development process for the new feature.... publishing cards when we have everything through QA and have confidence in all details of the release.”
Drafts will be made available in the coming weeks!
Working everywhere you do
Microsoft Teams
Staying connected across departments and time zones is a breeze with Microsoft Teams. And now, sharing knowledge will be a breeze too thanks to Guru’s new Microsoft Teams integration. Teams is one of the fastest growing communication platforms, and we are so excited to bring the power of verified knowledge directly to the Teams experience.
Teams users will soon be able to search for and share Guru Cards, verify knowledge, receive announcements, and reply directly to comments in Guru—all without leaving the Teams chat interface. We know how much time you spend in your chat tool everyday, so we don’t want you to have to leave your workflow to use and manage knowledge.
"Our company is now shifting entirely to Microsoft Teams and having the integration with Guru would be a game changer for us! There's unlimited potential for the end users being able to communicate Guru knowledge within their chat—especially now that people are speaking to each other across the globe. It's also going to really help with knowledge sharing across the company and best practices."
– Brantley Merritt, Global Learning & Development @ ServiceSource
Guru notification emails are getting an upgrade. We’re excited to partner with Google to leverage their dynamic email capabilities, which will make our emails more actionable and useful for customers. Now, users can take more actions on Guru content directly from Gmail. Actions include expanding Card content, commenting functionality, and the ability to verify knowledge, all from within our email digest. These updates will help users manage knowledge within their existing workflows, no context switching required.
Guru Customers that have both email notifications enabled in Guru and “dynamic email” enabled in Gmail should already be seeing these updates. If you don’t have “dynamic email” enabled, visit your Gmail settings to turn it on.
Guru for mobile
Finding and using knowledge on the go is easy with Guru’s iOS and Android mobile apps. Whether you’re en route to a big meeting, or your roommate is slowing down the wifi by streaming a workout class, verified knowledge is always available on your iPhone or Android device. To help you stay connected to your knowledge base at all times, we’re redoubling our mobile efforts in the coming months to make our mobile apps more dynamic and actionable. Look out for improved knowledge sharing and searching functionality in the near future.
Unite your entire team with knowledge
Working from home during a global pandemic is hard enough; don’t let siloed knowledge and disparate solutions make it harder. When your entire organization has access to verified knowledge everywhere they work, cross-departmental collaboration becomes simple.
“As an admin, it was really nice to see just how easy it was for everyone to transition into this new way of living.”
– Sara Davatelis, Data Warehouse Analyst @ SailPoint
Guru’s newest product updates are aimed to connect teams and operationalize org-wide knowledge. Check out Guru’s free Starter plan and education services to get up and running quickly in order to empower your remote teams with collaborative knowledge management.
Experience the power of the Guru platform firsthand – take our interactive product tour
