Choosing secure collaboration for your enterprise business

Mattermost is a secure collaboration hub designed for technical and operations teams.

Larger organizations with strict security, regulatory, and data control requirements want a collaboration platform that meets their needs. Mattermost Enterprise Edition is built for scalability and offers enhanced access controls and advanced functionality modern enterprises require.

What type of organization uses Mattermost Enterprise Edition? What features are included in Mattermost Enterprise Edition? In this article, we’ll answer these questions and discuss more added benefits that come with being an Enterprise Edition customer.

Which organizations benefit the most from Mattermost Enterprise Edition?

Mattermost Enterprise Edition was built for organizations with the highest security, compliance, and privacy requirements. The ideal enterprise customer needs a solution that supports inter-team collaboration with access controls that many popular SaaS solutions lack.

Mattermost enterprise customers are engaged in extraordinarily demanding projects — such as launching spacecraft into the cosmos and safeguarding global democracy. Enterprise clients can also benefit from commercial assistance directly from the Mattermost team to guarantee their systems are always promptly accessible.

What features are included in Mattermost Enterprise Edition?

Why do organizations like the U.S. Air Force, CERN, and Pramacom trust Mattermost Enterprise Edition to power their mission-critical workflows? Let’s take a look.

Advanced access controls

Mattermost Enterprise Edition includes robust access controls that ensure only authorized individuals are able to access sensitive messaging and collaboration data. We break up these controls into two groups:

1. User provisioning and authentication 
2. Permissions

User provisioning and authentication

Using Mattermost’s AD/LDAP integration, benefits to Enterprise Edition customers include:

• Centralized identity management
• Automatic account provisioning
• Syncing groups to pre-defined roles
• Single sign-on (SSO) by synchronizing SAML accounts with AD/LDAP.

These advantages enhance security, speed up the integration of new users, and boost team efficiency through the convenience of single sign-on. 

Additionally, Enterprise Edition customers can also configure SSO via Google, GitLab, OpenID Connect, Office 365, or by synchronizing SAML with Okta or OneLogin.

Permissions

Enterprise Edition gives organizations more control over what specific users and groups of users can do inside Mattermost.

For starters, Enterprise customers can use Team Override Schemes to tailor advanced permissions to the needs of each Mattermost Team. At the same time, they can take advantage of Delegated System Admin Roles to allow certain users to perform advanced administrative tasks without having to give them access to all system admin capabilities. Additionally, Enterprise customers can create custom user groups (e.g., “pmteam”) to reduce channel noise by ensuring only specific users are notified when the custom group is mentioned.

Security

Mattermost Enterprise Edition includes several advanced security controls that enable organizations to further shore up their systems and protect their messaging data. These include:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement, which requires users with email or LDAP authentication to use MFA to access Mattermost.

• Enterprise mobility management (EMM) via AppConfig configures enterprise mobile apps; Mattermost helps Enterprise Edition customers with custom mobile app development and deployment.

• ID-only push notifications, which limit the data sent to Apple and Google through a configuration setting, keeping sensitive data secure.

Compliance

Organizations with strict regulatory requirements prefer Mattermost Enterprise Edition, which makes it easier to achieve and maintain compliance with:

• Electronic discovery (eDiscovery) capabilities, which automatically extract user post data from Mattermost for evidence in legal cases, saving organizations considerable amounts of time and resources.

• Compliance exports using Actiance XML, Global Relay EML, and generic CSV. This enables you to automatically collect all data, including direct messages, file uploads, posts from plugins, and posts from bots and webhooks. Customers can also configure custom data retention policies and run reports regularly to send them to a specific shared location.

Speaking of granular data retention policies: Enterprise customers can set global and custom retention policies to manage how long messages and files are kept in Mattermost channels and direct messages; maintaining only the minimum amount of data required by law can help organizations keep eDiscovery costs down.

What’s more, Enterprise Edition gives customers the ability to leverage granular audit logs and record all activities and events performed within a Mattermost workspace (e.g., which users access the REST API). Admins can use controls for log generation and storage, applying a standard JSON schema to log output. 

Further, customers can also use the Channel Export plugin to export all messages in a channel in the CSV file format.

Scalability

Mattermost is built for scale. In most scenarios, organizations can run Mattermost on a single server with up to 2,000 users. For deployments between 2,000 and 10,000 users, organizations can run a three-machine configuration with a proxy, an application server, and a database server. 

Organizations with more than 10,000 users can accommodate them by adding extra servers in a cluster-based High Availability configuration, which is only available to Enterprise Edition customers. This setup has proven capable of supporting at least 70,000 concurrent users.

Our High Availability clusters ensure that a Mattermost instance maintains service during outages and hardware failures through the use of redundant infrastructure. In the event any one of the redundant components fails, the system will remain operational. Additionally, Enterprise Edition customers gain access to performance monitoring support via integrations with Prometheus and Grafana. This enables admins to track system health and identify any issues or bottlenecks.

On top of this, Enterprise Edition customers benefit from:

• Elasticsearch, which delivers optimized search performance to enterprise-scale deployments, preventing degradation and timeouts.

• A standalone Calls server via the rtcd service, which offloads performance costs through a dedicated service to efficiently support scalable, secure deployments.

• Kubernetes support for Calls to further improve scalability and gain more control over the deployment.

Advanced workflow features

Mattermost Enterprise Edition also includes a slew of features designed to help technical and operations teams collaborate more effectively. These include:

• Message acknowledgement. Users can request active acknowledgement of important messages by marking messages as Urgent. This automatically requests teammates click an Acknowledge button to indicate they’ve seen the message.

• Guest accounts enable enterprises to collaborate with vendors, contractors, and customers on Mattermost together. Mattermost allows you to limit their access to channels and team members. For example, you might use this feature to guide a customer through a support issue.

• Read-only announcement channels. Using advanced permissions, admins can create read-only announcement channels where only certain individuals can post messages. This is ideal for broadcasting important organizational news and updates.

• System-wide announcement banners. Admins can also display notices that appear at the top of each Mattermost interface to share important announcements. Use cases might include messages about planned downtime or the need to refresh the app to update to the latest version.

• Shared channels, which enable people from multiple Mattermost installations to collaborate together via federated architecture. By establishing a secure connection between multiple Mattermost instances, users from different organizations can collaborate seamlessly while admins maintain access controls over their own servers.

Playbooks

Playbooks are checklist-based automations that power team workflows. They also keep your teams aligned to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Playbooks are available to all Mattermost users. However, Enterprise Edition customers have access to several features that make Playbooks even more powerful, including:

• Granular Playbook permissions, which provide better control over confidential Runs and Playbooks as well as member management capabilities.

• The ability to add due dates to tasks, which gives teams more visibility into workloads and ensures everyone is accountable during each Playbook Run. 

• The Run Timeline, which allows teams to document a retrospective, with the ability to add selected Channel posts to the Timeline to ensure greater accuracy.

• The ability to request status updates from team members to ensure timely communication is provided for stakeholders.

• Private Playbooks, which help teams focus on executing their workflows with reduced noise and controlled visibility. 

• A Playbooks analytics dashboard with custom metrics that help teams identify key areas of valuable insights by measuring performance and improvement. 

• The ability to select what data to capture in a retrospective report to ensure each Playbook Run yields actionable knowledge for process learning and improvement.

Technical support

Mattermost offers a variety of support options for customers and members of our community. Mattermost Enterprise Edition customers benefit from round-the-clock support, 24/7, via email and online tickets with a promised four-hour response time.

Support for Enterprise Edition includes:

• Communication with IT administrators deploying and managing Mattermost
• Installation and upgrade assistance 
• Configuration and implementation guidance
• The ability to identify, create, and track appropriate bug reports

Mattermost Enterprise Edition customers also have the option to upgrade to Premier Support if they have at least 1,000 users. This top-shelf support option provides:

• Mission-critical response times, within 1 hour for Level 1 severity; within 2 hours for Level 2 severity

• Direct access to senior support engineers, with advanced technical and customer service skills to help customers with complex environments and mission-critical needs

• Development team priority, with issues immediately escalated to the development organization for assistance and fixes

• Screen-sharing, phone access, and health checks, which reduce time to resolution by working with the support team over the phone, audio conferencing, or screen-sharing to isolate, identify, and troubleshoot critical issues

• Installation and deployment advisory services, with help piloting your deployment 

• Licensing for four additional non-production environments, including staging and testing environments. 

Plus, Premier Support customers also have the potential to influence the Mattermost product roadmap and prioritization decisions. With privileged access to senior support staff and members of the Mattermost product team, the Mattermost product roadmap is often influenced by Premier Support customers.

Additionally, customers can also add on only U.S.-based support if they so choose.

Upgrade to Enterprise Edition today!

Mattermost Enterprise Edition is a self-sovereign collaboration hub that helps privacy-minded organizations deliver more focused, adaptable, and resilient decision cycles and outcomes.

When you’re ready to take the next step in your collaboration journey, learn more about Mattermost Enterprise Edition. 

While you’re at it, request a quote today and accelerate mission-critical work in the strictest, most complex environments — all while maintaining complete control over your most sensitive data.