Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Element’s multi-tenancy implementation of Synapse Pro has secured a Good rating in a penetration test commissioned by gematik, Germany’s national digital health agency. The security analysis rating is an important milestone in the widespread adoption of gematik’s TI-M Pro standard, which creates a sovereign, interoperable and secure messenger for healthcare professionals, by embedding healthcare specific requirements on top of the decentralised Matrix open standard.

Europe has been pursuing a digitally sovereign strategy for many years. The strategy entered the limelight back in 2019 when Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President, called for Europe to “achieve technological sovereignty in some critical technology areas.” With war on the edge of the EU, and an apparent breakdown of the rules-based international order, European governments are seeking full control of their technology with ever more urgency.

At FOSDEM 2026, the world’s largest open source conference, David Baker (Staff Software Engineer and the original author of Element Web) and Florian Duros (Senior Software Engineer) presented an inside look at Element Web - from its early days to the bold plans shaping its future. They shared how the team is modernising the platform to be faster, more reliable and more flexible - all while keeping the experience seamless for the millions of people who rely on it worldwide.

Cloud-based communication platforms like WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Signal or Zoom are widely adopted and generally considered “secure enough” for everyday enterprise collaboration. For defence organisations, and other sensitive areas, that assumption does not hold. Modern SaaS platforms require organisations to entrust their communications to vendor-controlled cloud services, frequently operated under foreign jurisdictions.

In an ideal world, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging apps would work identically to their non-E2EE counterparts (e.g. transport-layer security only), without introducing any additional inconvenience for users.

In operational environments — such as government agencies, emergency response teams, or critical infrastructure operations — teams often need to monitor multiple communication channels simultaneously. So we’re delighted to release Grid View to monitor, send and receive messages across multiple rooms simultaneously. It’s designed for teams that need to keep an eye on several conversations and data feeds simultaneously.

We’ve seen increasing interest in our ESS Community distribution from those looking for a free-use replacement of Mattermost Entry. Back in October 2025, Mattermost announced limitations as from Mattermost v11 for both of its free-use tiers (Mattermost Team Edition and Mattermost Entry). The chat history limitation of 10,000 messages for Mattermost Entry has caused a lot of frustration, especially considering it’s a self-hosted solution.

At The Matrix Conference 2025, I had the pleasure of presenting alongside the Element Call team on how we’re evolving real time communication on Matrix. I gave an introduction to Matrix, the missing primitives needed for real time communication (RTC) on top of Matrix, an overview of Element Call, and an outlook on adapting calling across the Matrix ecosystem. Watch the whole presentation.

At The Matrix Conference 2025, David Langley (Engineering Manager), Gaëlle Hunt (Product Designer) and I (Danielle Kirkwood) presented on how Element Web is evolving, bringing the web and desktop version of the Element app in line with the sleek design and usability of Element X on mobile. Watch the whole presentation.

At The Matrix Conference 2025, I shared the latest updates on Element Server Suite (ESS) - our distribution for Matrix-based deployments. ESS includes both the Classic stack and the new Helm-based ESS stack (organised into three editions: Community, Pro and TI-Messenger). Let’s break down their capabilities, and take a look at what’s ahead on the roadmap. Watch the whole presentation.