Mattermost vs. Rocket DevOps

Mattermost is definitely appropriate for a growing company with team members spread out across the u.s. and Canada. It’s given me the ability to have access to anyone with the information I need or the ability to develop friendships, working relationships with people I otherwise wouldn’t have access to

Incentivized

Rocket Aldon is perfect for simple changes to traditional IBM i development using RPGLE, CL, and DDS. It is great for finding related objects that are referenced in many locations and helping recompile all of these objects. However, Aldon has a particularly hard time with SQL views. For some reason, it is determined to lock every table related to a view even though this is not required by the operating system. Whenever one view references another view, you are always in danger of losing a view permanently if you didn't check it out and promote it. To clarify, imagine you created a view CUSTOMER_INFO. Then you make another view called CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS that joins the CUSTOMER_INFO to a shipping table. If you ever change CUSTOMER_INFO and then promote it, there is a good chance that Aldon will delete the CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS view and you will not get a single warning. It doesn't happen every time but when it does you are going to have a real mess on your hands.

Incentivized

• Easy intergration to our main CRM (Monday.com)
• I'm not techy myself but I have seen a lot of our previous integrations in Slack transferred over to Mattermost so that's fun
• The desktop and phone app (android) works well enough. I haven't tried it on the Apple ecosystem yet.

Incentivized

• Software Change Management
• IBM i development
• Object relationships

Incentivized

• Basic features like custom status, collapsed reply threads are JUST rolling out - kind of slow for a workplace chat app.
• I don't really get the idea of Playbooks and Boards - there are better, dedicated tools for stuff like this and it's not so easy to turn off.

Incentivized

• Check-in checkout process can be cumbersome
• UI is crowded and not intuitive
• Requires in house expertise maintain and manage

Incentivized

Mattermost works perfectly within our company as a way to communicate seamlessly. I have had no issues with the product and continue to use it often while on and off site. The mobile app allows me to continue to communicate with my team even when I don't have my laptop with me.

Incentivized

Based on current integration with our release process, we will need to keep this for the future.

Incentivized

It's an extremely easy to use software, and I would recommend it to every company that is growing. I think they could improve their notification system, as it gets a little spammy sometimes and important notifications get lost. Also needs to improve the number of private chats that you are allowed to create.

Incentivized

We have not had to contact support for Mattermost ever. All that we have needed has been available in the documentation or website. One of our DevOps team members set it up in a couple of hours. The whole team was using Mattermost that same day. No support needed.

Incentivized

Support is hit and miss. Sometimes they give some great assistance and sometimes they are no help at all. It always seems like they can't replicate the problem but then they never try to get on our system to do deeper research. It's kind of frustrating dealing with them. Also, the website isn't that helpful.

Incentivized

This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.

Incentivized

Unlike Slack and Discord, Mattermost is self-hosted and focused on security. I used Discord before for community management and much simpler and less secure operations. Slack is great, but the fact that is cloud based takes out a lot of its independence.

Incentivized

There are not a lot of CMS solutions for the IBM i server. Midrange Dynamics MDCMS is definitely one to consider. It seems very similar to Aldon Rocket and has a lot more functionality. I haven't used it but I have been to a demo and it looks promising. It seems a lot more intuitive and the promotions seem easier. However, that was a demo environment and even then it crashed so there's that to consider....

Incentivized

• The platform is adaptive to storage data center outages in case our cloud storage provider goes away, Mattermost still works with our local database. However, files couldn't be shared. We can switch storage to local temporarily; that's a benefit. Later it all syncs up to main storage.
• When our team switched to Mattermost from paid solutions, we had much savings and access to unlimited past messages and storage quota (we use our cloud storage provider)
• We have better visibility of our tools and other products running adjacent to Mattermost due to integration capability. We use it for notifications/ updates sent from other products.

Incentivized

• Software promotion is much easier and doesn't require custom coding.
• Developers can work collaboratively with less overlap.
• Developers can find objects faster and research code more thoroughly.

Incentivized