CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, studies the fundamental structure of the universe by examining the behavior of subatomic particles using highly complex scientific instruments, including the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. In 2015, the research institute deployed Mattermost across the organization to consolidate messaging platforms while providing its community of researchers, scientists, and technologists with a self-hosted, secure messaging space.

In the first three installments in this series, you learned how to send and request data with outgoing webhooks, incoming webhooks, and slash commands. In this article, you learn how to do this with the Mattermost API. Setting up webhooks or slash commands in Mattermost is very easy. Using the Mattermost API requires a few more steps. At the same time, the API is way more versatile and powerful than the other methods. Once you have made your first connection to the API, you will love it!

Mattermost Cloud offers our trusted Mattermost self-managed collaboration platform as a software-as-a-service and removes the burden of administration. Organizations are adopting cloud strategies and moving to cloud software. There are costs associated with hosting and securing software, especially in a highly available environment. Deploying and maintaining a self-hosted environment requires expertise and an upfront investment of infrastructure.

Mattermost release v5.29 is generally available today. In addition to offering bug fixes for increased stability, the new quality release features the general availability of a pre-installed incident management application, channel moderation settings, and Mattermost Omnibus.

Mattermost now gives users flexibility to organize channels and direct messages into custom, collapsible sidebar categories. Users gain full personalization of their sidebar to improve productivity, reduce clutter, and focus on what matters. Today, we’re excited to share a preview of some of the experimental sidebar features that the Mattermost team has been working on.

The idea behind Incident Management is to be ready. Not ready for anything, as that can be an unrealistic expectation, but ready to respond when the unexpected inevitably happens. DevOps teams often create incident playbooks in order to ensure they are as ready as possible to handle situations as they arise. Luckily, there is some amazing documentation on how to do just that from our friends at PagerDuty.

When Mattermost first started, it didn’t make sense for us to have an office; it was just myself and one other person. They were writing code the whole time, and I was on the phone the whole time, and being in the office we ended up interrupting each other. So eventually we started working from our homes and only got together when we needed to catch up.

I’m very excited to announce the general availability of Mattermost Cloud starting today. The new offering brings Mattermost’s industry-leading open-source, self-managed collaboration platform to the cloud as a SaaS platform.