Mattermost v6.0 is Now Available

The new Mattermost Platform is launching today with Channels, Playbooks, and Boards fully integrated into a new unified user experience. The platform is available across all subscription plans for both cloud and self-hosted deployment options.

Mattermost v6.0 is generally available today, launching a redesigned integrated platform. This release includes new platform navigation, plus new features and improvements to Channels, Playbooks, and Boards. A new Mattermost Desktop v5.0 application is released, and multiple features have been promoted to generally available. Highlights include:

• Mattermost launches as a platform including new subscription plans aligned across cloud and self-hosted deployments
• New global navigation and a redesigned user experience
• Promotion of multiple beta features to generally available
• Channels improvements including message link previews
• Playbooks improvements including workspace-wide view, improved status updates, and custom notifications timer
• Boards improvements including new channel selector, table calculations, and date ranges
• Desktop app v5.0
• Hungarian and Australian English promoted to officially supported languages
• Deprecations and breaking changes 
• Important upgrade notes and resources
• See changelog for additional detail

Mattermost Launches Redesigned Platform and New Subscription Plans

Mattermost is expanding our open source collaboration platform to include new integrated tools that address a wider variety of workflow types. Playbooks are for well-defined processes that typically follow a checklist-based structure. Boards are for managing and organizing projects and tasks across the entire product lifecycle. 

Channel-based messaging continues to be the architectural foundation of the platform and is tightly integrated with Playbooks, Boards, and other third-party tools and extensions. The platform is purpose-built for engineers to enable secure collaboration and workflow management across the entire software development lifecycle while minimizing context switching.

In concert with the platform launch, Mattermost Cloud and Self-Hosted are now offered with a three-tiered subscription plan model that uses a suite-based approach. Each subscription offers a curated package of features from the full suite of platform tools. The new plans reflect feedback from our community on how teams work with Mattermost at different scales; for example, features previously exclusive to our Enterprise tier are now available in other plans.

To learn more about our new subscription plans, please visit https://mattermost.com/pricing. 

New Global Navigation and a Redesigned User Experience

Mattermost 6.0 introduces a new platform navigation header to simplify your workflows and help you work more efficiently with Channels, Playbooks, Boards, and third-party integrations. Key functions such as search, saved posts, recent mentions, settings, custom status, and your profile are organized and easily accessible. You’ll also notice many cosmetic changes, including updated theme colors to align with our branding.

Learn more about navigating Mattermost.   

Promotion of Multiple Beta Features to Generally Available

We are pleased to announce the promotion of many features from beta to generally available. Many of these features have been in beta for an extended period to allow us to collect and address feedback from our community. The following features are now officially promoted to generally available: 

• Archived Channels
• Compliance Exports
• Custom Terms of Service
• Guest Accounts
• mmctl 
• Additional System Admin Roles
• Plugins
• ”ExperimentalTimezone”

Channels: New Message Link Previews

Links to any message you share in Mattermost channels will now generate a preview so you don’t have to switch context just to understand the reference. Previews respect channel membership permissions, so they’re only visible to users who have access to the original message.  

Additionally, we’re continuing to improve Collapsed Reply Threads with every new release. If you’re trying out the beta, we highly recommend upgrading to Mattermost v6.0 to take advantage of the latest bug fixes and enhancements. Please also join us in the ~Collapsed Reply Threads channel on our community workspace to report issues and share feedback. We expect to promote the feature to general availability before the end of this year. 

Playbooks: New Workspace-wide View, Custom Notifications Timer, and Improved Status Updates

Playbooks, formerly named Incident Collaboration, will be enabled by default with Mattermost v6.0.

This release includes a new workspace-wide view in Playbooks, where you can create playbooks and sort playbook runs across all teams in one place. 

Playbook status updates have been redesigned to reduce noise and enhance visibility for stakeholders with new in-channel status update cards and threaded broadcasts. 

Custom update timers have been added so you can schedule a reminder for the next update when posting a status update, allowing you to select a time or specify one using more natural language, for example, “October 13th at 9:00 AM.”

Boards: New Global Channel Selector, Table Calculations, and Date Ranges

With Mattermost v6.0, Boards (formerly named Focalboard) are enabled by default and will work out of the box when you install or upgrade to v6.0.

This release includes a new dashboard and channel selector that improves navigation — search and select boards from all your channels directly from the sidebar.

Analytics functions have been added for table columns; for example, showing the sum or range of work estimates, or quickly counting the number of filled-in values. This makes it easy to get high-level project metrics, without having to spend time building a report.

Date properties can now specify a beginning and end date — handy for planning work schedules, for example.

The shared boards feature is now disabled by default, and can be enabled by a System Admin in the Boards plugin System Console.

In addition, this release contains numerous improvements contributed by our vibrant community. Visit our GitHub page to help shape the future of the product.

Desktop App v5.0

The Mattermost desktop application now offers global platform navigation so you can work efficiently within Channels, Playbooks, and Boards. Keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to support navigating between tools and servers without touching the mouse.     

Hungarian and Australian English Promoted to Officially Supported Languages

Huge thank you to our community, particularly Zsolt Godó and Csaba Tóth, who contributed many Hungarian translations, and Matthew Williams, who contributed many Australian English translations! 

Mattermost is now available in 20 languages, and our community is currently working on several other translations including Vietnamese, Czech, Finnish, and more.

If you’re interested in translating Mattermost into a new language, we’d love your help. Please stop by translate.mattermost.com and join the Mattermost localization channel to get started!

Mattermost v6.0 Deprecations and Breaking Changes

With this release, there are breaking changes and deprecations to features, dependencies, software support, configuration settings, and plugins. 

Features: 

• Many Legacy Command Line Tools commands have been deprecated as they are fully replaced by mmctl. Many new commands have been added over the last few months, making this tool a full and robust replacement. 
• The Slack import tool, accessible via the Team Setting menu, is being replaced by the mmetl tool, which is much more comprehensive in the types of data it can assist in uploading.
• Audit Log v2 has been updated to use a new library which changes the configuration of this feature. 

Dependencies: 

• MySQL versions below 5.7.12: Minimum support will now be for 5.7.12+. Additionally, 5.6 (our current minimum version) reached EOL in February 2021.
• Elasticsearch 5 and 6: versions 5.x EOL in March 2019 and versions 6.x EOL in November 2020. Our minimal supported version with Mattermost 6.0 will be Elasticsearch v7.0.

Software support:

• Windows 7 reached EOL in January 2020. We will no longer provide support for desktop app issues on Windows 7.

Configuration settings: 

• All legacy channel sidebar experimental configuration settings are deprecated. We encourage customers using these settings to upgrade to v5.32 or later to access custom, collapsible channel categories among many other channel organization features. The settings deprecated include:
  • “EnableLegacySidebar”
  • “ExperimentalTownSquareIsReadOnly”
  • “ExperimentalHideTownSquareinLHS”
  • “EnableXToLeaveChannelsFromLHS”
  • “CloseUnusedDirectMessages”
  • “ExperimentalChannelOrganization”
  • “ExperimentalChannelSidebarOrganization” 
  • “DisableLegacyMFAEndpoint”
  • “ExperimentalTimezone”
• All configuration that has been previously marked “Deprecated”

Plugin API:

• Changes to mattermost-server/model for naming consistency

Plugins:

• Some breaking changes to plugins are included:
  • Support for left-hand side-specific bot icons was dropped.
  • Removed a deprecated “Backend” field from the plugin manifest.
  • Converted the “Executables” field in the plugin manifest to a map.

Important Upgrade Notes and Resources

Since this is a major version release, please take time to review the Important Upgrade Notes and upgrade instructions as well as our changelog. This release introduces database schema changes and longer migration times should be expected, especially on MySQL installations. Based on your database size and setup the migration can take a significant amount of time and may even lock the tables for posts, affecting posting and receiving messages.

As always, we are committed to ensuring the best possible experience for you and your organization. We will support Mattermost v5.37, which was released in July, as our last extended support release (ESR) for Mattermost version 5.x. This ESR will reach end of life in April 2022, giving you ample time to plan for your upgrade to this new version.

Please reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions on upgrading.  

Thank You to Our Contributors

Thanks for all community contributions this month and, in particular, our Mattermost v6.0 Most Valued Professional (MVP), Johannes Marbach, with 14 lifetime contributions to Mattermost Boards. Thank you for your continued contributions Johannes Marbach!

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Upgrade to Mattermost Release 6.0

To upgrade your existing server to the Mattermost v6.0 release, go here. Review the Important Upgrade Notes to make sure you are aware of any actions you need to take before or after upgrading from your particular version.

If you’re new to Mattermost, register for a 30-day trial of Enterprise Edition.