Mattermost 3.1: Apple Watch & notification upgrades, shortcuts, compact view and more

We’re on a roll!

Mattermost 3.1 is our 9th consecutive release made on the 16th of the month. Releasing monthly provides a stable, predictable process lets our community do its best work.

Our June release follows in that tradition with more compelling improvements: Notification upgrades to Apple Watch, phone, web and PC, a new compact view option, keyboard shortcuts, upgraded System Console, new OpenShift and CloudFoundry installers and so much more.

Note: Mattermost 3.1 includes security updates and upgrading is recommended.

Most Valuable Professional

For each Mattermost release we’re now awarding the title of Most Valuable Professional, or “MVP”, to an outstanding contributor in each release. Our MVP for Mattermost 3.1 is Thomas Balthazar, who completed a record high of 9 accepting pull request tickets in a single month. Huge thanks for making a difference in 3.1!

(Also, many thanks to GitLab for advice on starting this program, on monthly releases, growing community and in so many other ways.)

Now onto features:

Custom Alerts on Phone, Apple Watch, Web & PC

Never miss a beat.

With a few simple settings, Mattermost can customize notifications across all your devices.

Apple Watch

For example, after you’ve chosen your preferences, Mattermost notifications will intelligently appear across your Apple Watch and iPhone–and they even support emoji!

Specifically, when someone mentions you and you’re on your iPhone, you get the notification on your phone and not on your Apple Watch. When you put the phone in your pocket and someone mentions you again, it shows up on your watch, and not on your phone. It works like you expect by default.

Mobile push preferences

In 3.1, mobile notifications work like desktop notifications (rather than like email notifications in previous releases). From Account Settings > Notifications you can define whether you want mobile notifications for all activity, for just mentions and direct messages or if you want to disable them completely.

You can further customize your mention triggers to alert you on your first name, username, nick name and full name, and also on custom keywords you’d like to listen for across conversations.

It’s like having super human listening skills.

Keyboard shortcuts and channel switcher

For power users, Mattermost 3.1 offers keyboard shortcuts to help you move across the system without touching your mouse. New shortcuts include:

• CTRL/CMD + K: Open channel switcher
• Alt + Shift + Up/Down: Previous/Next channel or direct message with unread messages
• CTRL/CMD + Shift + A: Open account settings

Read more about shortcuts from our new product documentation.

Big thank you to everyone who discussed, voted on, and contributed to these features!

Compact View Display Option

Sometimes you want to see more on the screen at once. For those days, we now have a Compact View option from Account Settings > Display that reduces whitespace and hides image thumbnails so more posts can be seen at the same time.

Here are some examples of the Standard (above) and Compact (below) views for comparison.

Updated System Console

After a wide range of usability testing and user feedback, we’ve reorganized the System Console to make settings easier to find.

The community pours their time and energy into shipping powerful features for IT admins to enjoy, and if users can’t find and understand the feature, it’s as if it doesn’t exist.

Multi-Language Settings

For multi-lingual organizations, the System Administrator can now set multiple default languages for the server and the client, as well as limit the number of languages are available in Account Settings.

Integration Upgrades

Webhook posts now support advanced formatting through the use of message attachments. Include author information, titles, images, and thumbnails to customize the look of your integration posts.

Minor improvements were also made to improve Slack Compatibility. For example, it is now possible to notify @channel by using <!channel> in the post text.

E20: Support for Multi-Node Database Deployment

Enterprise Edition E20 now supports deployment on multi-node database clusters.

Support includes the ability to add multiple read replicas to your database deployment, plus the ability to load new configurations into the Mattermost server while it continues to run.

New Integrations

We’ve got some amazing work from the community this month to showcase as well.

OpenShift Origin Installer, thanks to goern.

A new Cloud Foundry installer by ArthurHlt for running Mattermost privately inside a CloudFoundry like Bluemix or PWS.

Coming Soon

While German language translation narrowly missed the release timeline for Mattermost 3.1, it is nearly ready for Mattermost 3.2.

Huge thanks to meilon for being our #1 translator this month and for krawalli‘s help to bring German language translation above 95% completion.

Thank you

Many thanks to all our other contributors. By project, in alphabetical order :

/platform

• apheleia, ArthurHlt, asaadmahmoodspin, coreyhulen, crspeller, DavidLu1997, enahum, goofy-bz, gramakri, hmhealey, it33, jasonblais, jwilander, kevynb, khoa-le, lfbrock, rompic, ryoon, samogot, ScriptAutomate, tbalthazar, tehraven

/ios

• coreyhulen, lfbrock

/android

• coreyhulen, DavidLu1997, it33, lfbrock, nineinchnick

/desktop

• CarmDam, it33, jnugh, MetalCar, Razzeee, yuya-oc

/docs

• apheleia, coreyhulen, crspeller, DavidLu1997, enahum, esethna, hannapark84, hmhealey, it33, jasonblais, lfbrock, maxlmo, mkhsueh, npcode, TwizzyDizzy

/mattermost-docker

• npcode, pierreozoux

The Mattermost project is defined by the contributions of its community, and we’re incredibly grateful for the difference each of you has made.

More about Mattermost:

Install

Install a new instance of Mattermost with instructions from our download page.

Update

Check out our upgrade guide for guidance on updating to the latest version and to try new features include Apple Watch notifications and compact view.

Enterprise Edition

Mattermost Enterprise Edition E10 and E20 are commercial versions of Mattermost designed for large organizations and available by subscription. See the feature list for more detail.

Looking for help on install and upgrade? A subscription also entitles you to upgrade and installation help from Mattermost, Inc.