Hi guys,
I work for a large enterprise that generally builds most of its apps on top of Microsoft technologies. My background in development is generally using managed languages, Java, C#, WPF, ASP.NET, on top of Windows and I am afraid to admit that my knowledge of linux is rather limited.
Now, I feel like my company could really benefit from a tool like Mattermost as we are unable to use anything that isn't self-hosted due to the nature of the work we do. At the moment team communication is generally handled via Skype and Email and it's all a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, being a primarily Microsoft-oriented company means that the IT guys are quite jittery about firing up a Debian/Ubuntu server and running something like Mattermost from there so I have been investigating the possibility of compiling and running Mattermost on Windows.
What I have found interesting is that I haven't seen anyone else really wanting to or needing to do the same thing but it feels like there must be other organisations where it would be a benefit to be able to run Mattermost on a Windows Server instance. After a little fiddling here and there I managed to get Mattermost compiled and running what seems like successfully on my Windows 10 development box running against a Windows install of Postgres.
So after that long-winded introduction I guess my questions are: is there any reason there has been no previous attempt to make a version of Mattermost available for Windows users? With my Windows go-compiled version, am I likely to run into any unforeseen issues or should it run as well as it would under osx/linux?
I have to admit, I cheated slightly and took all the prepared javascript/css/html files from the 1.2.1 release and used them with my own compiled version of the 1.2.1 go source as obviously running in a Windows environment I have no easy way of using a makefile but I presume the same could be achieved in a gulp/grunt script that would work for Windows developers (again, my javascript knowledge is painfully out of date here so I could be wrong!).
Anyway, if anyone could answer those questions I would be very grateful as I think Mattermost could work really well in a Windows environment - especially if I can write some webhooks into TFS and our other eployment tools so that issues can be surfaced in specific channels rather than through crappy emails!
Cheers guys 
,
James.