Slack and Microsoft Teams are two popular remote work collaboration platforms. They’re both cloud-based apps that simplify the process of communicating and sharing between multiple teams of people anywhere in the world. In GetVoIP’s list of the best free team collaboration tools, both Slack and Teams make an appearance. If they’re so similar, how can you choose which one to use? What’s a better fit for your job or working style?

Recently, a colleague of mine joked that she manages a marketing team of three: Claire, Mark, and Sally. The punchline is that she’s referring to Clearbit, Marketo, and Salesforce. She felt that way because they each have their own role with unique insights and jobs, and her team shares information with everyone else the same way she does through chat.

The Mattermost platform is a powerful messaging tool that enables secure team collaboration. Rather than creating unique Mattermost plugins for each tool, Cognitio created a custom SMTP mail intercept capability that leverages AWS Lambda functionality and custom code to create integrations for a number of third-party applications.

This year, I got a unique opportunity to call in at Mattercon 2020 and give a talk about my experience working on Mattermost and open source software (OSS) in general. I talked about how OSS helped me grow as a self-taught developer and how working on issues from Mattermost’s repos helped me gain experience and confidence in software development. In this article, I will highlight some of the things I talked about and also throw in a few pointers related to working on OSS.

Mattermost 5.23 includes improvements that will help your team collaborate more effectively.

A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in 2016 and a 14-hour outrage cost Facebook an estimated $90 million in March 2019.

Nowadays, Slack is often the default choice for an online communication tool in the tech industry. Startups, enterprises, open-source projects - they all use Slack to communicate within their organization but sometimes also with their users and community. Our startup was no different. In this article, I explain what made us look for Slack alternative and what are our impressions after a month of switching to Discord, so you can learn from those before you make your decision.

As of April 15, 2020, Mattermost Extended Support Release (ESR) version 5.9 is no longer supported. If any of your servers are not on ESR 5.19 or later, we highly recommend that you upgrade immediately. With our simple upgrade steps, it takes only a few minutes. Mattermost adopts a monthly tick-tock release cycle, with a new version shipping on the 16th of each month.