Mattermost 3.6 improves multi-team deployment, performance, emoji reactions, CLI and much more
Welcome back! We hope you had a chance to relax with family and friends over the holiday period.
We are delighted to kick off 2017 with the release of Mattermost 3.6. It adds a team sidebar for multi-team deployment, an early release of emoji reactions, upgraded command line tool and performance monitoring. We also have a host of new community integrations including GitLab auto-deploy, an AWS AMI for Mattermost, GitLab and Kanboard, and a new PHP driver. Plus Microsoft Operations Manager Alerts via Mattermost! What a great release!
We’re also delighted with the response to our Holiday Hackfest, which ran from December 8 to January 8. We received more than 50 contributions and we will highlight these in an upcoming blog post. Thanks to all who contributed and in particular our Most Valuable Professional for Mattermost 3.6, Carlos Panato!
Mattermost 3.6 is now available for download. It includes security updates and upgrading is recommended. Thanks to Julien Ahrens for contributing the security report through the Mattermost Responsible Disclosure Policy.
In this issue:
Multi-Team Deployments
Emoji Reactions (early release)
Improved Command Line Interface
Mattermost – the Global Workplace!
Performance Monitoring for Large-scale Deployments
New Integrations
GitLab Auto Deploy with Mattermost
AWS AMI with Mattermost, GitLab and Kanboard
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Alerts Via Mattermost
PHP Driver for Mattermost
Coming Soon
Second Generation Mobile Apps
Desktop App 3.6
Multi-team Deployment: Making Life Easier for Team Players, More Efficient for Business
Our user community consists of effective team players. Mattermost is built around their needs and their way of working: team-oriented and user-friendly. Many of you work in multi-team deployments which means you want to be able to see notifications from two or more teams simultaneously.
Our new team sidebar makes this really easy and convenient. All of the teams that you want to see at any time are clearly listed, and you can instantly see notifications on teams that are currently inactive.
That also translates into greater efficiency: you need never miss an important or urgent notification.
New Team Sidebar lets users receive mention notifications across teams and quickly switch among teams.
You’ll also save time as you no longer have to add a separate tab for each team on Mattermost Desktop Apps. To update your team management tabs, simply go to File > Settings or click Ctrl+Comma on your keyboard to visit the App Settings page.
To join other teams or create new ones, just click on the [+] icon. If you have lots of teams the sidebar will scroll, so the screen will remain uncluttered.
Instant Feedback with Emoji Reactions (early release)
Instant feedback is part of today’s organizational culture and emoji reactions provide a great way to provide it – and receive it. Emoji reactions are symbols added to another user’s message that can be incremented by other users. So you could give a [THUMBS UP] to show that you like something, and other users can click on that symbol to register their agreement.
Mattermost 3.6 adds new keyboard commands so that you can easily give the thumbs-up , a smiley, a wow, a celebratory hug, an invitation to lunch … or whatever reaction suits the need or the mood of the moment. Just type ‘+:emoji:’ as your message, send it, and an :emoji: will be attached to the most recent post. Or simply click an existing emoji reaction to have your say! Big thanks to Björn Roland for his help improving this feature.
There are a few open tickets left before the feature is complete, such as adding an emoji picker. If you’d like to help, come join our Contributors community channel and let us know.
P.S. Emoji reactions in Mattermost also make it fun and easy to conduct a quick poll among your teammates:
Intuitive CLI Improves Command Line Productivity
We’ve upgraded the command line interface (CLI) in Mattermost 3.6. It’s more intuitive and easier to use, which will provide a productivity boost for system administrators.
We’ve also provided interactive documentation so that help is at hand at the system admin’s “moment of need”. Learn more in our documentation.
Improved command line interface reduces errors and improves productivity
Mattermost – the Global Workplace!
We have more great progress to report on the languages supported by Mattermost!
The new release adds support for non-alphanumeric unicode characters in hashtags – in particular, hashtags in CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) thanks to a contribution from Hyeseong Kim.
Mattermost continues to be a global workplace messaging phenomenon with 11 languages currently available: English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian.
As you can see from the map below, Mattermost has conquered most of the world! Can you help fill in the remaining gaps? For example, perhaps you (or someone you know) can translate into Polish, Italian, Norwegian, Indonesian, Swedish … the fact is, we’re building a truly global workplace and if you’d like to join more than 400 contributors to make that happen, please join the Mattermost localization channel to meet the community and get started.
Map of completed and in progress languages
A special thanks to our localization leads, in alphabetical order: aeomin (Simplified Chinese), Archie Roller (Russian), Christian Arnold (German), Elias Nahum (Spanish), Hyeseong Kim (Korean), Rodrigo Corsi (Portuguese), Ron Hartman (Dutch), Tze-Kei Lee (Traditional Chinese), Wai Yi Leung (Dutch), William Gathoye (French) and Yusuke Nemoto (Japan).
Performance Monitoring for Large-scale Deployments (Enterprise Edition E20)
Enterprise E20 deployments of Mattermost can have thousands and thousands of users per server in a cluster-based, high-availability configuration. Optimizing systems to maximize the performance of these deployments delivers a high return on investment.
Enterprise Edition E20 integrations with Prometheus and Grafana in Mattermost 3.6 give system administrators the power to achieve that ROI. With these popular analytical dashboards you can see at a glance how your Mattermost server is performing and easily monitor its performance over time. See our documentation to learn more.
Mattermost metrics visualized in a Grafana dashboard.
New Integrations
We’re seeing wonderful new integrations every month and January is no exception!
If you’ve built one, or are working on one, please join our community channel for installers or community channel for integrations and apps hosted on our nightly builds server. We’d love to meet you and discuss your work!
When you’re ready to share your work, please let us know!
Here are some of the top projects this month:
GitLab Auto Deploy with Mattermost
GitLab 8.15 introduced Auto Deploy: a way to let you quickly and easily deploy your application to your Kubernetes cluster. It is complete with multiple environments and review apps.
The GitLab Auto Deploy works with Mattermost Commands, which are very easy to install. It lets you create new GitLab issues, search for issues on your GitLab project and start a CI job that deploys from one environment to another.
To learn more, see the GitLab documentation or watch an excellent video.
AWS AMI with Mattermost, GitLab and Kanboard
Now available on Amazon Web Services: a solution to make life easier and more efficient for busy project managers. Intuz Project Management software brings together GitLab, Kanboard and Mattermost – putting all your project team’s communication in one place and easily trackable.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Alerts via Mattermost
If you are using Microsoft SCOM (or another monitoring system such as Solarwinds, OMS or Datadog) here’s some great news about how you can increase efficiency by minimizing e-mail traffic and making alerts smarter with Mattermost. Setting it up with webhooks is simple. You will then be able to interact on and notify alerts in Mattermost messaging. Thanks to adatum for this integration!
PHP Driver for Mattermost
Mattermost drivers offer access to the Mattermost web service API to easily build Mattermost integrations in languages supported by the drivers.
The JavaScript Driver lets you connect with the ReactJS components of Mattermost while the Golang driver connects with the Golang-based web service of Mattermost and is used by unit tests.
This month we are delighted to announce an amazing contribution from Thibaud Dauce – a new PHP driver for Mattermost! Its installation is easy so, in no time at all, you’ll be able to send incoming webhooks to Mattermost with various customization options.
To learn more or to contribute, visit the GitHub project – thanks Thibaud!
Coming Soon
Second Generation Mobile Apps: Faster Than Ever
React Native is a great option for creating iOS and Android apps that are highly performant even with poor mobile connections and feel at home on their respective platforms.
Preview of current React Native apps – more updates to come
So IT administrators and Mattermost users alike will be delighted to know that we are working on second-generation Mattermost mobile apps for iOS and Android. The framework is currently being finalized and we expect to have an early release in Q1, at which point the apps become open to community contributions.
If you’re interested in collaborating on the project, please join our Mattermost Native App discussion channel and let us know.
Desktop App 3.6
Mattermost Desktop App 3.6 is coming soon to continue the evolution of the popular solution for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Upcoming planned features include an inline spell checker, improvements to the user experience following the release of the team sidebar, performance improvements, and for enterprise users, support for SAML OneLogin and Google authentication.
Special thanks to Yuya Ochiai and Jonas Schwabe for their continued efforts on the Desktop App. Stay tuned for an announcement in February!
Thank you
Many thanks to all our other contributors this release. By project, in alphabetical order:
/platform
- asaadmahmood, bjoernr-de, bolecki, brendanbowidas, CometKim, coreyhulen, cpanato, crspeller, debanshuk, enahum, esethna, fraziern, grundleborg, hmhealey, it33, jwilander, kaakaa, khawerrind, lfbrock, maruTA-bis, pepf, raphael0202, Rudloff, Yangchen1, ZJvandeWeg
/docs
- aureliojargas, axilleas, esethna, grundleborg, hmhealey, it33, jasonblais, JeffSchering, jwilander, kaakaa, lfbrock, lindy65, nils-werner, okin, quentinus95, qyra, shieldsjared, tejasbubane, Tethik, yangchen1, yumenohosi, yuya-oc, ZJvandeWeg
/mattermost-api-reference
/desktop
/android
/mattermost-mobile
/mattermost-load-test
/mattermost-docker
/mattermost-docker-preview
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 or Upgrade Mattermost
Install a new instance of Mattermost with instructions from our download page. Check out our upgrade guide for guidance on updating to the latest version.
Enterprise Edition
Mattermost Enterprise Edition E10 and E20 are commercial versions of Mattermost designed for large organizations backed by commercial support from Mattermost, Inc. 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.
