Today, we’re excited to announce Mattermost is available on the DigitalOcean Marketplace. Our 1-click install enables teams to run open source messaging and collaboration in the cloud with a frictionless developer experience.

Mattermost is well-known as a flexible, open source messaging platform. But what makes it even more useful is its ability to automate connections with bots and webhooks and to link up to external applications. These automations and connections are known as integrations. Many integrations are available off-the-shelf through the Integrations Directory. But there are lots of ways to create your own.

Does your team love tests? Unit tests, functional tests, systems tests, acceptance tests. They can seem like a lot of extra work, but they’re crucial to creating valuable, stable products. It’s never fun, though, when a test run breaks right before release and the scramble starts to fix the code and get release back on schedule. I can’t tell you how to not commit breaking code.

We love Mattermost and have been using it for seamless team communication. It simplifies document-sharing and team work to boost productivity. Recently, we asked ourselves a few questions: What if we could extend the capabilities of our favorite collaboration tool to cater to our clients? Better yet, what if anyone from the customer support or sales department could answer customer queries that originated from our website directly through Mattermost?

We’ve been working on integrating call tracing in the server to provide exact measurements of all API and DB calls. We’ve picked OpenTracing—a lovely open source project that allows you to set up trace reporting and enables you to support Distributed tracing.

For many organizations, Mattermost is valuable not just as a standalone messaging system for chatting with team members, but as a central system where conversations, tools, files, and workflows come together to help teams get work done. One of the most powerful ways to connect Mattermost with other tools and build more efficient workflows is through plugins, our system for extending and changing a Mattermost server’s capabilities.

Mattermost 5.18 ships with new features designed to improve security and help your team work more efficiently. Try these new features by downloading Mattermost 5.18 today.

Enterprise compliance policies begin with data. How can you better protect sensitive data—such as proprietary or customer information—by limiting access to authorized individuals? Compliance officers and IT security teams alike need tools that give them oversight and governance over user access to the company systems that store such data. Your messaging platform is no exception. Sometimes, sharing confidential information with partners and vendors is necessary to do business.

Following the record-breaking Hacktoberfest that saw more than 200 contributions to Mattermost in October, we held a virtual hackathon November 22–26. Over the five-day period, 45 members from our open source community, including contributors and staff, created amazing features and plugins for Mattermost. We were all impressed by the Mattermost Hackathon presentations last week—wow!