Hi everyone, there is a significant user model change planned for Mattermost 2.2 shipping on April 16. It's been discussed with key contributors and their deployments and we want to gather more feedback and considerations from the broader community.
Design challenge
Mattermost was designed as a self-hosted solution for team communication where users were considered "team members". A user did not exist without a team.
This became problematic for organizations with multiple teams, because one user needed multiple accounts for each team. This meant a user had to check multiple accounts in order to receive their direct messages.
Design approach
To solve this issue, Mattermost 2.2 will enable accounts to be unified across teams.
This means:
- Users now create one account per server
- One set of account settings applies across teams
- Question: How high a priority is it to have different theme color options per team on user accounts?
- The "Find my team" feature is no longer needed, any user who is logged in will be able to switch to or join any team for which they have permission
- Teams can add team members from the list of members on the server, in addition to inviting non-users to create accounts via link or email as is available today
- Direct messages work the same way across all teams--any user on the server can message any other user on the server without being restricted by team
- How high a priority is it to add an option to limit the users added to the DM list per team to members of the team?
- Account usernames and emails need to be unique across the system.
- Users with accounts using identical usernames or email addresses will require some migration steps, which we'll be working on this month.