Mattermost 3.2: German Language Translation, Custom Emoji, Exchange & XMPP integrations, Windows & Mac Apps and more

Guten Morgen!

German language translation, custom emoji, wide screen search, and upgrades to threaded messaging, performance, and Windows and Mac apps, plus Exchange and XMPP integrations: Mattermost 3.2 is our 10th consecutive release made on the 16th of the month–and it’s our finest version yet.

Note: Mattermost 3.2 includes security updates and upgrading is recommended.

Most Valuable Professional

Huge thanks Christian Arnold, named our Most Valuable Professional this release for leading the German translation project and individually translating more than 10,000 strings!

German Language Translation

German is our sixth language for Mattermost, and it expands our reach to 75-100 million more people in the world who speak German.

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It’s been delivered at an exceptional level of quality thanks to Christian Arnold and a wonderful team of contributors, in alphabetical order: alisanli, azinken, a.schmitz, der_test, florianjb, Frostik, innovation, julg, lixef, Kaun, koenigskind, krawalli, LarsB, mamo, matthias, medokin5, meilon, ninerian, paepke, patricks, Perrylicious, philipp, pstiffel, reach3r, rompic, timkandel, zweistift.

In addition to German, we’ve got some wonderful new features for Mattermost users:

Custom Emoji

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Can’t find the emoji you’re looking for?

You can now create custom emoji in Mattermost. Pick a name, find an image (animated GIFs work too!), and fill out the Custom Emoji form.

Let the fun begin!

customemoji4

Improved Threaded Messaging

Mattermost 3.2 improves readability up to 15% depending on your default screen width.

While users love threaded messaging, the old Mattermost interface need to leave room on the right size of messages for a reply count and menu.

BEFORE: Threaded messaging reply count and menu took space away from message text display.

In Mattermost 3.2, the reply count and menu are moved to the same line as the user name, providing more room for message text, and up to 15% more room to read.

AFTER: Reply count and menu moved up to same row as username, allowing up to 15% more room for message text.

It’s a small improvement that pays off again and again with every screen you read.

Widescreen Search

The ability to search and filter across channels and direct messages gets even better in 3.2 with the ability to view search results in a widescreen view.

Just click “expand sidebar” when your search results come up to view, and use “shrink sidebar” to return to normal size.

Upgraded Windows and Mac Apps

On July 18th, Mattermost Desktop apps for Windows and Mac graduate from their beta program to become release-quality apps, complete with codesigning and compelling upgrades:

  • New Windows installer to make getting started easier than ever
  • Numerous new keyboard commands to switch across teams and channels and zoom
  • Ability to automatically launch the application on login for Windows
  • Ability to toggle the app from the Window system tray

See Mattermost Desktop 1.3 changelog for full details, and also checkout the beta version of Linux.

Special thanks to Yuya Ochiai, the maintainer of the official desktop applications and all our contributors, especially Razzeee, our top contributor for the 1.3 release.

Mattermost apps offer a trusted, connected, easy-to-use experience for your users, download the desktop apps today. 

E10 & E20: Advanced Access Control Policy

For managing teams of teams and sophisticated organizations, Enterprise Edition offers an advanced access control policy for defining which users can manage system invitations as well as creation, deletion, renaming and modifying public channels and private groups, along with other system settings.

We’re working closely with customers to roll out more policy options to help large organizations achieve their full potential through enterprise-scale communication.

Discover the benefit of Enterprise Edition by getting a trial license today.

E20: SAML, Okta, ADFS Integration

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In additional Active Directory and LDAP, Mattermost 3.2 now offers corporate directory integration with SAML, Okta and ADFS. These benefits include:

  • Single-sign-on: Users can sign in to Mattermost with their SAML, Okta or ADFS credentials.
  • Centralized identity management: Mattermost accounts can pull user information including first and last name, email and username.
  • Automatic account provisioning: New Mattermost user accounts are automatically created the first time a user signs in with their credentials on the Mattermost server.

Mattermost officially supports Okta and Microsoft ADFS as the identity providers (IDPs) through the SAML standard, see our product documentation for more details.

Contact the Enterprise Team for a demonstration and discussion to learn more about the benefits of Enterprise Edition.

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New Integrations

Growth of the integrations community continues to accelerate, and we’re seeing a wonderful trend of more and more new integrations build off existing open source projects to create more value in less time than ever before. Some top projects to highlight this month:

CalendarBot

Huge thanks to Marco A. Harrendorf for creating calendarBot for Mattermost, a Python-based calendar bot now available via pypi. Features include:

  • Posting of calendar events to Mattermost from Microsoft Exchange calendars
    • Channel can be selected based on category selection for event, or use a default channel.
    • System can define how far in advance notifications are sent prior to calendar events.
  • Bot integration via mattermost_bot enabling
    • Creation of events and subcalendars from within Mattermost
    • Showing the agenda of all subcalendars or a selected subcalendar
    • Saving of calendars and events online and locally

The work builds upon matterhook by numberly and mattermost_bot by LPgenerator and it’s an outstanding example of how quickly the Mattermost integration community is growing.

Matterbridge XMPP

Matterbridge is a popular IRC integration for Mattermost created by 42wim. 42wim is now developing XMPP support and is using https://prosody.im/ for testing.

If you have your own XMPP server and would like to help in this project’s development–or if you’d like to discuss integrations at all–please join our Mattermost Integrations and Apps channel.

A note about “matterbots”

There’s a few projects using the name “matterbot” and while we’d love to promote them, it’s tricky because there’s a definitely some sort of “matterbot” coming to the Mattermost server.

In some ways, the Mattermost code base is like a kernel, and we’re hoping people build their own distinctive applications on top of the OS. So instead of “LinuxDB” and “LinuxWebServer” we’re hoping people come up names like “MySQL” and “NGINX”.

Whatever name you choose, we hope you’ll come and meet the Mattermost team and other integration developers in the Mattermost Integrations and Apps channel.

Coming Soon: Traditional Chinese

While Traditional Chinese language translation narrowly missed this release, it’s ready for Mattermost 3.3. Huge thanks to Chikei for being our top translator this month and helped bring the language to 100% completion.

Dutch translation is also close, at 90%, and Simplified Chinese is the next closest at 71%. If you’d like to contribute just find your language on the Mattermost translation server and click the button under “Need Translation”.

Thank you

Many thanks to all our other contributors. By project, in alphabetical order :

/platform

/desktop

/docs

/mattermost-driver-javascript

/mattermost-docker

The Mattermost project is defined by the contributions of its community, and we’re incredibly grateful for the difference each of you has made.

More about Mattermost:

Install

Install a new instance of Mattermost with instructions from our download page.

Update

Check out our upgrade guide for guidance on updating to the latest version to access new features including German language translation.

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.

mm

Lindsay Brock is the former Head of Product for Mattermost, Inc. Prior to joining Mattermost in January 2015, she served as a product manager for SpinPunch, a Y Combinator-backed online gaming startup. Lindsay is an alumnus of the University of Waterloo, where she earned a bachelor of applied science degree in engineering.