Mattermost Release v5.28 is now available

October 16, 2020

Platform

The new feature release offers granular administrator roles, certificate-based authentication with AD/LDAP, and in-product notifications.

Mattermost Release v5.28 is generally available today. The new feature release offers granular administrator roles, certificate-based authentication with AD/LDAP, and in-product notifications.

The release includes the following new features:

Enterprise Edition

Granular administrator roles for delegated administration (E20 Edition)
Certificate-based authentication with AD/LDAP (E10 Edition)

All Editions

In-product notifications for product updates

Granular administrator roles for delegated administration (E20 Edition)

Mattermost now offers three new pre-built granular administrator roles to enable you to selectively delegate administrative tasks to other members of your organization. The three new roles are System Manager, User Manager, and Read-only Admin.

In previous versions, the System Admin role was the only administrator role and it granted full access to the System Console and all administrative functions (via API and command line). This single administrator role meant that in order to delegate administrative tasks, you needed to grant full access to another member of your team.

Now, with the three new administrator roles, you can selectively delegate duties related to support, user management, reporting, and plugin management to trusted team members without granting them full access. For example, you can use the new roles to do the following:

Delegate administrative tasks and user management.
Delegate plugin management.
Grant read-only access to the System Console.
Grant access to manage authentication and access control systems such as AD/LDAP, SAML, etc.
Grant access to compliance reports and controls.

To assign these roles, you’ll need System Admin privileges. You can assign any of the three new roles to users, as well as modify their privileges, via local or remote mmctl commands.

Below is a detailed list of permissions for the new administrator roles and their default access to sections within the System Console:

System Manager
- Read/Write
  - User Management
    - Permissions (Read-only)
  - Environment
  - Site Configuration
  - Integrations
- Read-only
  - Edition/License
  - Reporting
  - Authentication
  - Plugins
User Manager
- Read/Write
  - User Management
    - Permissions (Read-only)
- Read-only
  - Authentication
Read-only admin
- Read-only
  - All pages within the System Console

Here’s an example of access permissions as seen by a User Manager in the System Console:

Learn more about new admin roles.

Certificate-based authentication with AD/LDAP (E10 Edition)

You can now improve the security of your AD/LDAP authentication with certificate-based authentication. Certificate-based authentication enables the Mattermost server to authenticate to your AD/LDAP directory with a client certificate in addition to the bind account credentials. This additional authentication mechanism provides increased protection against potential credential misuse.

To enable the feature, upload a public certificate and private key in System Console> AD/LDAP. This will allow a certificate to be used as authentication for AD/LDAP.

In-product notifications for product updates (All Editions)

Now with an in-product notifications feature, you and your users will receive notifications regarding new product enhancements within your Mattermost application.

You will be notified when new Mattermost server versions are available with recommendations for server configurations to optimize your users’ experience.
Your users will be notified of new product features and the availability of new desktop client versions.

Admins may choose to disable notices in the System Console > Notices. Learn more about in-product notices here.

Thank you to our contributors

Thanks for all community contributions this month and in particular our v5.28 Most Valued Professional (MVP), Soo Hwan Kim, who has made 28 lifetime contributions to the Mattermost project. Thank you for your continued contributions, Soo Hwan Kim!