Mattermost channels and how to use them in our office

Hello Team,

I’m planning on using Mattermost Team edition for our small office of approximately 10 people and for 2 of our vendors as well so we can use Jitsi for video and screen sharing for support purposes.

I see when our employees login they are directed to the Town Square channel by default. If I setup a private channel for our employees to use, can I change the default channel for our employees so they are directed to this private channel first and not Town Square?

Same goes for our vendor. I was going to setup a private channel for each vendor so that any of our employees would be able to chat/video conference with the vendor from that channel. When a vendor logs in to our Mattermost, can I have them only see the channel that was setup for them and no other channels?

I suppose what I’m looking for as well is to turn off all public channels for our office as I don’t see a reason to have them for our usecase. Is this possible?

Secondly, our vendor has a number of support people and we may not know which one we will get when we open a support case and call them on the phone. What I would like to do is have our employee login to Mattermost, go into the private channel for that vendor and create a link the vendor will use to access our Mattermost site. Our employee will call the vendor and whomever they get the employee will send them an email with the link and while on the phone with them will give them the login username and password that support person from our vendor will use during this support call. Is this possible to do in Mattermost?

Thank you.

Town Square is default and has to be there, you may change the name.

There’s an experimental setting to open additional channels for new users but it seems not possible to default to private channels.

/opt/mattermost/bin/mattermost config set TeamSettings.ExperimentalDefaultChannels channelname

For private channels this should work, the vendors can always see the public channels.

It seems you can’t delete Town Square so you need at least one public channel.

See also the mattermost documentation.

The employee invites the vendor by (email) link and lets him access a private channel. The vendor opens the link, creates a user and Immediately the vendor has access to this private channel and can communicate only with the employee.
The employee could create the user for the vendor, give him the password and delete the user afterwards for one time actions.

Use /opt/mattermost/bin/mattermost user delete user1 user2 to delete users, disabling is possible too.

2 Likes

Thank you @mrmarkuz for your help!

I may just have Mattermost used internally then and not allow our vendors to connect. Our employees can create from Mattermost a Jitsi Meeting and send the link and password to the vendor to join the meeting. It’s nice to have Mattermost assist our employees with creating a room in Jitsi.

Do you know of a way to modify the text on channels? I would like to change the text within the Town Square chanell. I see where it allows me to change text of town square but I would like to change the " Welcome to Town Hall!
Post messages here that you want everyone to see. Everyone automatically becomes a permanent member of this channel when they join the team."

Thank you!