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!

Utilizing ChatOps for issue resolution isn’t new, but the benefits of using a single tool for communicating and resolving issues gives it lasting power. The ChatOps model enables teams to take action on their day-to-day work directly from collaboration platforms, including Microsoft Teams. Since many Dev and ITOps folks are using Microsoft Office 365 for their daily work, it was a natural next step for Opsgenie to align with Microsoft Teams.

Since our inception, open source contributions have been integral to our business and success. This October, as we participated in the great Hacktoberfest event, organized by Digital Ocean and hosted by GitHub and this month as we host our own hackathon event, we reflect upon and appreciate our community.

Mattermost 5.17 ships with new features that will help your team work together more productively.