Mattermost December 2016 Update: Holiday Hackfest, Tuleap, Xen Orchestra & Homebrew integrations, upcoming January release

In this December announcement we focus on some of the great new community integrations (thanks to everybody who has contributed) and preview our next release, Mattermost 3.6.

In case you missed it we also recently launched Mattermost Desktop App 3.5.

Meanwhile the holiday season is nearly upon us – a great time to enjoy with friends and family; a break from routine. And time to take part in our Holiday Hackfest! Whatever you’re up to, we wish you loads of comfort and joy and we’ll see you in the New Year.

Mattermost Holiday Hackfest

Following on from the success of Hacktoberfest, we will be running our very own Mattermost Holiday Hackfest from December 8 to January 8. It will provide opportunities for experienced open source developers who would like to contribute, as well as for beginners who want to learn Go, React or JavaScript.

Anyone who contributes at least four pull requests to our GitHub repository merged with a Hackfest label will be rewarded with an exclusive Mattermost shirt. Plus there will be a special prize for the top contributor – harshavardhana won the Hacktoberfest award in October for Minio integration.

New Community Integrations and Guides

Huge thanks to our top projects this month:

Tuleap: get a daily #Scrum update on your dev channel

Start each morning knowing exactly where you are with your project sprints. Tuleap Agile & Libre, the 100% open source platform for agile management and software development, is now integrated with Mattermost.

You can get a preview here. You may also be interested to hear the reasons why the Eclipse Foundation chose to use Tuleap and Mattermost by viewing this video clip.

Above: A sample Scrum update in Tuleap

Xen Orchestra report plugin for Mattermost

Xen Orchestra provides an out-of-the-box web interface to XenServer, the leading open source virtualization platform – a cloud network on top of Xen! Its report plugin now integrates with Mattermost. You will find further resources here on GitHub. Big thanks to all the contributors!

Above: A Xen Orchestra report – now integrated with Mattermost

Homebrew-Cask for Mattermost Mac Desktop App

Homebrew: you have to love the name, you have to love what they do. “Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t.” So here’s some great news if you are using Homebrew-Cask for managing macOS applications such as Google Chrome and Adium. It now integrates with Mattermost. Learn more on GitHub.

Java-based tool for managing private notes in Mattermost

Matternotes is a Java-based tool for creating and managing private notes in Mattermost. You can create notes globally or for a specific channel and they are only visible for their creator. The integration contains several features to help customize your notes.

Matternotes was inspired by Slack’s Slashnotes, but is hosted on your server and therefore you have full control of your data. Huge thanks to ldziedziul for creating this integration!

Guide for running Mattermost on Google Container Engine with TLS

A special thanks to Admiral Obvious for creating a short and well-structured guide to run Mattermost on Google Container Engine with transport layer security (TLS).

Mattermost Desktop App 3.5

Mattermost Desktop App 3.5 released on December 14. The update improves keyboard shortcuts, adds a display of URLs when hovering over links, updates configuration settings page, and includes other improvements to overall user experience.

There are also operating system-specific enhancements that give Mattermost a more native look and feel. See the Mattermost desktop changelog for a complete list of improvements.

Coming Soon: Mattermost Server 3.6, easier to use than ever

Mattermost 3.6 is our January release and we’ll give you a full update in the New Year. Meanwhile, here are a few features under development that are candidates for the 3.6 release:

Team Sidebar for improving cross-team notifications

We’re committed to making Mattermost as user-friendly and team-oriented as possible. The addition of these new sidebar features will make life a whole lot easier if you are engaging with multiple teams (and that is most of you!), and improve cross-team notifications.

Here’s an example. In the screenshot (below) the user has two teams: Contributors and Bladekick. There are three notifications pending on the currently open team, Contributors. There are none pending on Bladekick, which also shows an unread icon (the small dot).

Above: The new team sidebar

Moreover, when you sign in, the last active team appears – you no longer have to pass the team selection page on login!  You can also easily join other teams or create a new one by clicking on the [+] icon, when applicable.

There is no danger of the sidebar becoming cluttered: if you only have one team, it is automatically removed from the sidebar, and the sidebar will scroll if there are several teams.

Emoji Reactions (early release)

Ever wanted an easy way to conduct a poll on Mattermost? Or add a “+1” to like a post? Now you can! We’ve added new keyboard commands so that you can quickly insert emoji reactions into your posts.

Just type `+:emoji:` as your message, send it, and an :emoji: will be attached to the most recent post. Or click an existing emoji reaction to have your say!

There are a few open tickets left to ship this feature, such as adding an emoji picker – if you’d like to help ship emoji reactions in Mattermost 3.6, join our Contributors community channel and let us know!

Performance monitoring in large-scale deployments (Enterprise Edition E20)

Enterprise E20 deployments of Mattermost can have thousands of users in a cluster-based, high-availability configuration, where optimizing systems to maximize performance has a high return on investment.

We will therefore support deployments at scale through Enterprise Edition E20 integrations with Prometheus and Grafana. These popular analytical dashboards make it easy for system administrators to monitor how their Mattermost server is performing over time.

Above: Mattermost metrics visualized in a Grafana dashboard

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.