Oose minimizes meetings (and emails!) with Mattermost

oose Innovative Informatik eG is an IT training company and consultancy headquartered in Hamburg, Germany that offers training and education opportunities to clients. As a corporation with no formal hierarchy, the company is laser-focused on baking as much efficiency into its operations as it can. Since employees are distributed and often give training sessions at customer locations, oose tries to minimize meetings and coordinate work asynchronously as often as possible.

Reimagining how to conduct training sessions

In 2020, the oose team had an idea: Instead of conducting IT training sessions in person, the company could build an online community so that all clients could access educational content at their convenience. To power this idea, oose began surveying communications platforms to see which might be the best fit.

Due to the nature of the platform, Microsoft Teams wasn’t an option.

“Running a community on Teams is strange,” Rosburg says. “The licensing would be tricky, and there’s vendor lock-in as well.”

After studying Teams, the oose team considered Slack. Eventually, they decided that the platform was too expensive and, since it was acquired by Salesforce, there was the risk of vendor lock-in, too.

Ultimately, they decided to build the community on Mattermost, the open source messaging solution for technical and operational teams.

“A big part of oose is using open source software whenever we can,” says Jan Rosburg, an IT administrator at oose. “As an open source tool that’s also good-looking, it was kind of an easy decision.”

The initial idea of building communities got reworked and refocused and is more marketplace-focused now, but the oose team continued using Mattermost as an internal communication, coordination, and collaboration platform.

Today, the company has 40 active users across 130 public channels and 100 private channels who’ve produced more than 60,000 posts.

Accelerating onboarding with Mattermost Playbooks

When Mattermost Playbooks was introduced, the oose team came up with the idea of using the tool to coordinate onboarding workflows.

“We started small, kind of experimenting,” Rosburg continues. “Now, it’s a huge playbook. Every onboarding is different, but they all involve the same tasks that we need to do again and again. Having it coordinated through Playbooks keeps everyone on the same page.”

With Playbooks, oose has been able to bake in lots of efficiency and transparency into onboarding workflows.

“It streamlines the process and helps us make sure we’re not forgetting any tasks and not having to reinvent the wheel again and again,” Rosburg says, adding the onboarding process is more reliable than before.

Running a business supported by a platform that keeps improving

Since Mattermost has been around for several years and the platform is constantly receiving new features and updates, Rosburg is confident the oose team has found a long-lasting communication and collaboration solution.

“As soon as there’s a new update, we install it,” Rosburg says.

In particular, Rosburg likes the ability to access several different tools within one interface.

“The most valuable part of Mattermost is the integration of different disciplines,” Rosburg says. “You have Boards for organization, Channels for chat, and Playbooks for templates.”

Thanks to Mattermost, oose has been able to reduce its reliance on email while increasing team productivity.

“A lot of our communication besides Zoom is done via Mattermost,” Rosburg says. “We decided to do away with email ticket-based support and move to a public channel where people can say, ‘We have a problem,’ — for example, ‘Zoom is not working.’ If three other people have the same problem, maybe it’s an external issue. The transparency of these conversations is very helpful.”

By consolidating communication in one place, oose has been able to save server resources and move away from inefficient email communication.

Speaking of Zoom, the oose team uses the Mattermost Zoom integration to spin up spontaneous video calls when they need to chat through a problem.

“We just write to each other on Mattermost, asking if the other is available,” Rosburg says. “If they are, we hit a button and launch a Zoom call.”

oose started to take advantage of Mattermost’s ease of integration by using webhooks with workflow engines like n8n.io and sending alerts from Prometheus to channels and receiving information about trainings the company offers. Looking ahead, the company is considering GitLab integration.

What would Rosburg say to someone considering Mattermost for messaging and collaboration?

“I would definitely recommend Mattermost,” Rosburg says. “The stability and the support you get is incredible.”

Once, the oose team was struggling with the Kubernetes High Availability setup due to misconfiguration and “missing knowledge on our side,” Rosburg says.

“We got really great and fast support from the Mattermost team,” he continues. “When you’re running a business, support is crucial. Those guys absolutely know what they’re doing. They’re great.”