Q-Hub Platform Update – August 2026 Release

This release goes live on Monday, 3 August 2026. It covers six platform updates plus a first look at the roadmap for the rest of the year.

Summary of updates

2FA options

2FA now lives in the company admin panel, alongside SSO settings. Admins can make 2FA mandatory business-wide (with exclusions, e.g. shared shop-floor accounts) or apply it only to selected people. A default 2FA method is set at the business level, and users can be forced to set it up on their next login. Support documentation on setup already exists in the support centre.

The admin panel itself is also getting a visual tidy-up to group SSO, 2FA, and access settings under a single "trust" section — this is coming as a follow-up, not part of this release.

Microsoft document editing

After roughly a year working with Microsoft to get this approved, Q-Hub now supports creating and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files natively:

• Create a new Word/Excel/PowerPoint document from within a process, or from a template, directly in Doc Hub (rolling out to other hubs afterwards)

• Edit opens the file in Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint online in a new tab

• Multiple people can co-edit the same document simultaneously

• Uploading a replacement file is still supported for cases where someone has sent a document externally

• Documents and templates built this way flow through the existing up-issue (review/approval) process as before

• Templates can be created directly from Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents (right-click → make template)

Audit Hub → Compliance Hub

Built from customer feedback gathered over the last couple of years. Existing requirements, templates, and audits carry over — nothing is lost — but the pages are significantly upgraded:

• Requirements: each requirement now opens a table view with statistics and filtering, and tapping into a requirement shows every piece of evidence gathered across past audits, any linked items (documents, processes, forms), and a chat window scoped to that requirement's data. Requirements can also be linked together, so evidence for one clause counts as supplementary evidence for equivalent clauses in other standards.

• Templates: switch between tile and table views; opening a template shows its full audit history and lets you schedule it directly.

• Audits: three ways to build an audit — the existing full requirement-set audit, a new question-based audit (write questions manually or generate them with AI against chosen requirements), and an upgraded external audit type that can ingest an auditor's uploaded report and automatically create evidence, non-conformances, OFIs, and tasks from it.

• Scheduling: the Gantt chart is rebuilt with adjustable timeframes, plus a new calendar view and an Excel export for sharing schedules externally.

People Hub — general availability

People Hub moves out of beta and switches on by default for every account on release day. Key changes based on beta feedback:

• Homepage redesigned around overdue items — on-time/late analysis and activities with the most overdue actions

• People page shows role assignments, activity counts, skill coverage %, and expiring/expired items per person

• Person profile page includes an AI chat scoped to that person's data, recent activity history, uploaded certificates, skills (target vs. current), roles, review history, and comments

• Activities page upgraded with tags, required training/certification setup, and course allocation (e.g. first aid)

• Early integration with iHasco for health & safety training completions, syncing into Q-Hub as activities

• Compliance matrix (filter by group) shows training/skills/role coverage at a glance

• Smart activity engine: if a requirement is already satisfied by a recent action (e.g. a document already read within the window), it won't re-trigger — and expiry dates auto-extend when linked documents are re-issued and re-acknowledged

• Portal users get their own profile, activities, and certificates by default; managers (per the org chart) get a "my team" view to assign tasks and carry out reviews for their reports

• Covers use cases like probation reviews and periodic policy read-and-understood requirements out of the box; scheduled one-to-one reviews are planned as part of the upcoming task management overhaul, not this release

A dedicated People Hub webinar is scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday 4 August, after release, so everyone can explore it live first.

Portal navigation update

Minor but useful: the portal's left-hand panel now separates workspaces (a dropdown of the workspaces that portal user has access to) from portal selection, rather than combining them. Portal users also get quick dropdowns under the hub section (e.g. jumping straight to audits or findings they're assigned to).

AI system ("Q-Hub AI Brain")

AI is off by default on every account when this update ships. No account data is exposed to AI until an admin turns it on.

Q-Hub's AI has moved from an OpenAI/ChatGPT-based engine to a Google-hosted LLM, specifically to keep AI infrastructure and data residency UK-based and under Q-Hub's ownership. Additional detail for IT teams will be published on the new support pages, with a dedicated AI webinar planned in a few weeks.

How it works once switched on:

• Turning AI on exposes top-level metadata already visible via the platform's search — document titles/tags/owners/versions (not document content), form and process names, audit titles and requirements, people/activities/skills, and register names — to power an upgraded, natural-language search bar (including voice search via a microphone button).

• All existing access and permission controls are enforced — AI cannot surface anything a user couldn't already see through normal search.

• Turning AI on also enables AI-assisted generation of forms, processes, audit templates, registers, and people activities, plus a general AI chat window.

• The "AI brain" is a further, opt-in step (aimed at IT/quality/compliance managers) where specific features (e.g. an incident process, a supplier register) are queued for deeper indexing, so users can ask natural-language questions directly against that data (e.g. "how many NCRs have we had from a given supplier this year?") and get a chat-style answer with links back to source records.

• Credit balance and usage history are visible to admins on the new AI page in the admin panel; token limits per account are being finalised for a later update.

• Planned next step: giving third-party assistants (Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT) permissioned access to Q-Hub data, so questions asked from those tools can be answered using Q-Hub records.

AI-assisted features are also appearing contextually across the platform — for example, on the Compliance Hub requirements page, AI can summarise the evidence gathered against a requirement across past audits.

Roadmap — what's coming after this release