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 Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
,
James.
