October 2025

October 4th

What’s New in This Release

This release introduces major enhancements to how exercises are designed and experienced.

• Sidekick Assistants: AI-powered helpers now built directly into the Exercise Editor, enabling designers to generate and expand MELs through natural conversation and attach context files for richer results.

• Search & Replace: Quickly update terms across MEL (Master Events List), PoL (Pattern of Life), and Personas Historical Content in one action, saving hours of manual editing and reducing errors.

• Msngr Plus Groups: Organise participants into realistic team structures, target injects to groups, and allow group admins to manage membership live in Player View.

• Pattern of Life Emails: Improved handling of email injects for greater reliability and consistency.

• Performance & UI: Faster Communicator login for large-scale sessions, a revamped Microblog experience, and a wide range of bug fixes and stability improvements.

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Improvements & New Features

Sidekick Assistants

What’s New Sidekick is a new AI-powered sidebar built directly into the Exercise Editor, designed to help scenario designers move from raw ideas to working exercises faster than ever.

In this first release, Sidekick introduces Assistants: AI helpers that make building and expanding MELs as simple as having a conversation. Among them is LISA, an Assistant specialised in writing directly into the MEL. With LISA, designers can speak naturally to create injects on the fly, watch them appear in the MEL, and enrich outputs with context documents. Instead of switching tools or manually drafting injects, Sidekick keeps everything flowing in one place.

As part of our broader migration, the Assistants list you see in Sidekick builds on the one previously available in AXS, now integrated directly into the Editor to streamline workflows and reduce tool-switching.

The result is a faster, more creative way to turn an idea into an exercise, keep adding to it as the conversation evolves, and reduce the manual work of building large exercises.

⚙ How it Works

• Sidekick (slidable panel): The panel inside the Exercise Editor that gives you access to all Assistants in one place, without losing focus.

• Assistants list & session picker: Sidekick contains a list of Assistants, each with a different capability (e.g. LISA writes MELs directly, others generate CSVs or structured content). This list evolves from the Assistants you may know from AXS, now embedded directly into the Editor. Here you can choose an Assistant, view past conversations, and continue where you left off. Sessions persist until expiry.

• Conversational content creation (LISA): LISA is a specialized Assistant for building or expanding MELs directly in the Editor using natural language prompts. Injects are added live to the current MEL tab.

• File attachments: Upload supporting documents to give Assistants improved context or scenario-specific data.

📄 Notes

• Assistants are exercise-based: they remember your requests only within the current exercise (until the session expires). To start a new interaction with LISA or any other Assistant, a new exercise must be created.

• Sessions expire after 60 days. Expired conversations cannot be recovered.

• Assistant sessions are not copied when an exercise is duplicated.

• Only LISA writes directly to the MEL; Other Assistants output CSVs for import.

• LISA only adds to MEL. It does not update already added content. If a content has already been added, Designer must change it manually.

• Attachment formats supported: PDFs, Images (JPG, PNG), PPTs, Docs (TXT, DOC)

• LISA Assistant understands and generates content in multiple languages.

• LISA Assistant does not support attachments in this first release.

• Licence: Raven+

Use Case Example

A designer wants to run a cyberattack exercise for their crisis team but only has a rough idea in mind. With Sidekick open in the Editor, they give LISA a starting point by pasting in an article, uploading a PPT, or writing a short description. LISA instantly generates the first three serials with injects. If the designer is happy, LISA writes the injects into the MEL so they appear live, and the designer can keep expanding the exercise just by continuing the conversation.

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Search & Replace

What’s New We are introducing a new Search & Replace feature that allows scenario designers to quickly update content across MEL, PoL, and Persona Historical Content. Instead of editing injects one by one, designers can now locate and replace words or phrases in minutes, saving time, reducing errors, and improving consistency across large-scale scenarios.

⚙ How It Works

The feature enables designers to:

• Search across MEL, PoL, and Persona Historical Content from a single panel.

• Replace results either selectively or all at once.

• Apply filters by Faction, Tag, or Channel.

• Navigate results with Find Previous/Next.

• Use Match case for precision.

• Undo or redo changes as needed.

📄 Notes

• Formatting is not preserved; replacements are inserted as plain text.

• Leaving the field empty or typing only a space will delete the word.

• Smartwords are replaced like normal text: the platform treats all words as static.

• ▼ button keeps your last search; ✕ button closes panel and resets search.

• Licence: Raven+

Use Case Example When an organisation name or sensitive term needs to be updated across multiple Injects, designers can use Search & Replace to filter results, review them, and apply the change across all relevant content in just a few clicks, reducing hours of manual work to minutes.

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Msngr Plus Groups

What’s Improved

Clients running demanding exercises often need to organise participants into smaller groups that mirror real-world team structures.

Msngr Plus Groups allows this by enabling designers to pre-configure groups in the Exercise Editor and then send targeted injects to those groups via the MEL . Positions or Personas assigned as group admins can manage membership directly during the live exercise in Player View. The result can be a more convenient or realistic communication flow.

⚙ How It Works

In the Exercise Editor

• Create Groups: In Channel Configuration, build groups manually or reuse existing Teams names.

• Assign Membership: Add personas or positions, and designate admins. Msngr Plus Groups can include multiple admins.

• Target Injects to Groups: In MEL, you can now configure Msngr Plus injects to be delivered directly to a selected group.

• Rename General Feed: Customize the default feed name to align with exercise design.

• Profile Auto-Setup: Player details (name, picture) are inherited from exercise profile.

In the Player View

• Admin Controls: Msngr Plus Group admins can add or remove members, assign admins, and rename groups during play.

• Enter-to-Send: Players can send messages quickly within groups.

📄 Notes

Personas in groups: Designers can add personas directly into a Messenger Plus Group during exercise design. These personas will automatically appear in the group.

Players in groups: For a player to participate in a Msngr Plus Group, the designer must:

• Create or select a Position.

• Assign that Position to the desired Msngr Plus Group.

• Assign the same Position to a player. Once this is done, the player will have access to the group and appear alongside the personas already added.

Impersonation and Positions:

• A Position can grant a player both access to a Msngr Plus Group and the ability to impersonate certain personas.

• Important: assigning a Position does not add personas to the Msngr Plus Group. Designers must manually decide which personas belong in each group.

• If a Position allows impersonation, the player can act as those personas inside the Msngr Plus Group.

Personas and Positions added to a group through the Exercise Editor cannot be removed during a live exercise.

Players can leave groups if option "Choose if participants can leave groups during live exercises" was selected in Channel configuration.

When the facilitator resets the exercise, all groups revert to their original configuration as set in the Exercise Editor.

Licence: Hawk, Osprey, Eagle

Use Case Example In a flood response exercise, the facilitator sets up groups for Communications, IT, and Operations during scenario design. Injects can be directed to the Communications group only, ensuring realism. During play, admins in the Player view can add extra participants to the Communications group on the fly, assign a new group admin, and monitor conversations as they unfold, closely mirroring real-world crisis collaboration.

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Email on Pattern of Life

What’s Improved Pattern of Life stacks have been improved to better handle email injects. Previously, email combined with social channels in the same stack caused broken behaviors ("disappearing replies").

These issues are now resolved with clearer rules for channel selection and expanded targeting options.

⚙ How It Works

• Stacks containing email can only include additional emails.

• Stacks containing social channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) cannot include email.

• This separation reflects the difference between social media (shared posts) and email (individual copies per participant).

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Microblog UI Revamp and refactoring

The Microblog (aka Twitter/X) channel in Player View now has a refreshed design inspired by the latest X interface.

Most noticable is the "trending hashtags" on the right-hand side of the feed displaying the 5 most popular hashtags at any time. This is updated in real time as content is published.

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Performance Improvements

Communicator

We made several performance improvements to speed up registration and authentication for large exercises of 100+ participants.

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Bug fixes and tweaks

Multiple bugs fixed and small tweaks across the product suite to improve user experience.