The open source Mattermost Team Edition and the commercial Mattermost Enterprise Edition now release six times a year.
After extended discussion with our community, we decided a bi-monthly cycle has more benefits than our previous monthly cycle.
The next releases are planned for:
- November 16, 2016
- January 16, 2017
- March 16, 2017
- May 16, 2017
- July 16, 2017
- September 16, 2017
Hot fix releases for priority security issues and priority bug fixes will continue to ship as before.
While we are mindful of the potential downsides (such as longer waiting time for non-priority fixes), we’re choosing a bi-monthly release for the following benefits:
- More improvements - Each release requires hundreds of hours of coordination and manual testing. Investing that time in development enables us to ship more overall improvements on a bi-monthly schedule compared to a monthly schedule.
- Less work for IT admins - Bi-monthly releases mean less work for IT, and more improvements per release.
- Fewer out-of-date deployments - All other things being equal, 6 releases per year results in fewer out-of-date deployments compared to 12 releases per year.
- Easier to accept contributions - Monthly releases means there’s very short windows to accept and merge community contributions. Bi-monthly releases make it easier to work with the community.
