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.

Let’s say you’re shopping in a retail store. You have everything on your shopping list except for one item. You’ve browsed through each of the aisles (twice), and you still can’t find what you’re looking for. What do you do? You’ll most likely go to the service desk. There, an associate can direct you to the aisle and shelf of where the item is. This is exactly how the IT service desk works for internal employees throughout an organization.

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.