Mattermost February 2017: Mattermost hunts U.S. fugitives, OpsGenie & Trax integrations, new Desktop Apps

Mattermost helps ex-CIA, NSA, FBI hunt U.S. fugitives on TV

When the U.S. reality TV show “Hunted” premiered January 22 on CBS following the AFC Championship Game, millions of viewers saw Mattermost in action! The show tells the story of former United States White House CIO, Theresa Payton, former intelligence operatives and special forces as they hunt fugitives in Atlanta, Georgia. Mattermost appeared on screen several times as they exchanged texts and images.

Mattermost is of course a great choice wherever specialist teams need highly secure messaging. Click here to find out more!

Two-way OpsGenie integration for Mattermost

OpsGenie has created a two-way integration with Mattermost, which is powerful and easy to configure. You can send notifications of OpsGenie’s robust alert system right into your Mattermost channel and in turn close or assign these alerts from the channel, as easily as entering a command like /genie ack 12.

You can execute a variety of actions directly from Mattermost such as mute OpsGenie notifications, get alert details, view on-call schedules and much more!

Check out more details about this fantastic integration.

Time tracking commands for Mattermost

Ever had that feeling, “It’s been such a busy day, I just don’t know where the time went!”? Of course you have – we all have. Well, now it is easy to keep track of time with Trax, a great new integration from Eliot Berriot. We think it will be especially useful to team members who need to assign their time to different projects.

Trax also enables you to set up reminders in Mattermost – useful for reminding yourself or team members about a meeting, or to remind your co-workers that something important needs to be done when you’re away. You can also set up reminders directly within Mattermost.

Time tracking is set up with timers, each of which has a name, a start date and an end date. Built-in reporting then enables you to see the time you spend on activities assigned to each timer. Trax is particularly clever as it can work in fuzzy “human” time. For example, you can type in “tomorrow” or “in ten minutes” rather than entering a precise time and date. Find out more here.

Thanks Eliot!

New Mattermost Desktop Apps

We’ve made further improvements to Mattermost Desktop App 3.6, now scheduled for a release candidate cut on February 17, final release February 28. The release continues the evolution of the popular solution for Windows, Linux and Mac. Stay posted for a full announcement, meanwhile here’s a brief overview of some of the new improvements:

• • Support for SAML OneLogin and Google authentication for Enterprise users

• • Fixed login issues with local development environment

• • Improved user experience following the release of new team sidebar

• • Simplified app options

• Streamlined desktop server management

Sneak Preview: New Features in Mattermost 3.7

We’ll be releasing Mattermost 3.7 on March 16th – here’s a sneak preview of what’s to come:

API version 4

User and community integrations are important to the Mattermost ecosystem. To make the Mattermost API web service easier to use and to offer more powerful options for these integrations, Mattermost will be moving to a new API Version 4 in 3.7. Highlights include:

• • Fully documented API endpoints

• • More in-depth access to server functionality

• • Wider use of established HTTP verbs

• • Consistent endpoint structures

• A new and improved Go driver

API version 4 is an active and ongoing project. We’re looking for contributors to code server endpoints, build drivers, and write documentation. If you’re interested in helping, please join our Mattermost community instance and the APIv4 channel.

Note that API version 3 will be supported until September 16, 2017.

Second generation mobile apps

Mattermost core team is developing second generation Mattermost mobile apps for iOS and Android and we expect to have an early release in mid-March. The apps are built to be highly performant even with poor mobile connections and feel at home on their respective platforms. Find out how to contribute here.

Curious to find out about recent changes to the new mobile apps? You can do so by searching for #rnchangelog in https://pre-release.mattermost.com/core/.

New website link previews

Thanks debanshuk for contributing new website link previews, which display a preview of website content! It replaces the previous link preview feature that handled only a subset of links.

While a few more improvements are in progress, we’re planning to release the new previews in 3.7.

Bulk loading system simplifies import of large data

Mattermost 3.7 will provide a flexible and easy to use way to import bulk data into a Mattermost server. The import process can be run on a live system without impacting performance during the import process.

Data is imported one entity at a time, without the need to load the entire data set into memory before processing. What’s more, you will be able to import data from virtually any source, and to set any suitable attributes during the import process. If for any reason the import process is interrupted, it will automatically restart where it left off.

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.