Mattermost 4.1: Integration enhancements with personal access tokens and streamlined apps, starting with JIRA

The Mattermost 4.1 offers integration enhancements including:

• Streamlined apps, starting with JIRA – While integrations with apps built for Mattermost and apps built for Slack work out-of-the-box via APIs and webhooks, add-on connectors are required for other applications. To streamline setup for those apps, Mattermost is now offering custom connectors with popular apps in this category, starting with JIRA.
• Personal access tokens – This release, setup of custom integrations is also streamlined by allowing System Admins to enable the generation of revocable personal access tokens by developers and IT staff seeking to connect to 3rd party apps.

We are also approaching nearly 100 open source integrations! Check our Mattermost Integrations Directory to discover new open source and commercial Mattermost apps and extensions.

Plus, Enterprise Edition E20 now offers new compliance features to disable file sharing only on mobile experiences, and omit contents from notification emails.

Thanks for all community contributions this month and in particular to our 4.1 MVP Nazar Laba for his help migrating Mattermost webapp UI components to Redux.

Mattermost 4.1 is now available for download. Since it includes security updates, upgrading is recommended.

New JIRA App

Ever wanted to route tickets from different JIRA projects into different Mattermost channels? Or customize what kinds of JIRA tickets are posted?

Now you can – and within minutes! The new built-in JIRA app lets System Admins set up JIRA integrations easily by sending Mattermost messages from new issue creations, updates, and deletes.

All it takes is a couple of settings in the System Console. The admin can then share the webhook URL with multiple users for use in their own JIRA projects. Learn more in our documentation.

Personal Access Tokens: Easier and More Secure Integrations

Here’s more great news for System Admins and integration developers: personal access tokens! They provide an easier and more secure way to interact with the Mattermost server.

This new feature in the System Console means:

Greater security:

• You can create bot accounts with any sign-in method, including Enterprise authentication methods such as LDAP and SAML 2.0.
• You can easily revoke tokens in the System Console, and search by users.
• Each token is self-contained and includes information for Mattermost to check validity and convey user information.

Easier management:

• You can use bot accounts to post to any Mattermost channel with these simple steps.
• Personal access tokens don’t expire, simplifying integration management.
• More granular permission-settings for specific scenarios, easily assigned from the System Console.

Let’s look at a specific scenario. Say you want to set up an integration that posts to a particular channel or a public channel. You might want to ensure that the account is authenticated with a session token before posting, preferably via a secure sign-on. You might also want to use bot usernames but prevent users from overwriting these (as they could masquerade another user).

All this can now be easily set up via the System Console. Assign which accounts can generate tokens, which will have the same permissions as the user who generates them. The System Admin can at any time assign new permissions (such as post to all channels and post to all public channels) via the dropdown option “Manage Roles”, which appears in the System Console if access tokens are enabled.

Learn more in our documentation.

Enterprise Edition E20: New Compliance Features

Enterprise Edition E20 adds new features to simplify compliance requirements:

• Omit message contents in email notifications. Only the sender’s name is included in the notifications when enabled.
• Disable file sharing on mobile. Applies for both file uploads and downloads on iOS and Android mobile apps.
  

Enterprise Edition E20: Elasticsearch (Beta)

Enterprise Edition E20 now offers a highly available elasticsearch engine in Beta.

A high availability cluster enables a Mattermost system to maintain service during outages and hardware failures through the use of redundant infrastructure. With a new Elasticsearch engine, you can now run highly efficient database searches in a cluster environment.

Furthermore, you can our search replica feature to isolate search queries onto one or more database servers. A search replica is similar to a read replica, but is used only for handling search queries.

Elasticsearch is open source, easy to use, and provides the most powerful text search capabilities built on top of Lucene, a fully featured information retrieval library.

It is a RESTful search and analytics engine that provides instantaneous answers to dynamic and full text search queries. In future Mattermost releases, it can also provide approximate answers from data, taking account of mis-spellings in searches.

New Updates for Android & iOS Apps

New updates for Android and iOS mobile apps were released last week with search, group messages, improved performance on poor connections and much more.

Bonus: Connect Mattermost with Over 700 Cloud-Based Apps

Use the Zapier integration to connect Mattermost with over 700 cloud-based applications to increase your team’s productivity. You can automate tasks and post messages triggered by activities in apps such as GitHub, Gmail, Jira, Twitter and more.

We are delighted that Zapier has moved the Mattermost app out of beta given its vast popularity and positive end-user feedback.

Community Integrations

The contributions from our open source community make this release even more exciting! If you’ve built an integration, or are working on one, please join our community channel for installers or 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 it, please let us know!

Here are some of the top projects this month:

Fedora RPM Package for Mattermost Desktop App

It is now easier to deploy the Mattermost desktop app on Fedora, in addition to Ubuntu and Debian already supported. You can find the download packages and installation instructions here.

Thanks to Agoston!

A PHP Library for Mattermost APIv4

The new PHP library allows developers to use Mattermost data as objects via a set of specific models. Data related to teams, channels, users, posts and others are converted to model objects to be easily used and manipulated. Error responses from the Mattermost API are also handled as specific domain exceptions.

Thanks to Ema Panz for this contribution!

RSS Feed Integration for Mattermost

You can parse RSS Feeds and post them to your Mattermost server with this simple open sourced bot.

Big thanks to PromoFaux for this integration!

Thank You to Our Contributors

Many thanks to all of our other contributors to this release, listed in alphabetical order:

94117nl, amyblais, asaadmahmood, bkmgit, ccbrown, coreyhulen, cpanato, crspeller, csduarte, debanshuk, dmeza, enahum, esethna, fkr, fraziern, grundelborg, harshavardhana, hmhealey, it33, jasonblais, JeffSchering, jminardi, jnbt, john-combs, jwilander, kaakaa, lfbrock, lindalumitchell, lindy65, megos, moonmeister, MusikPolice, pichouk, Ppjet6, prixone, Samiksha416, saturninoabril, thePanz, Whiteaj36

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