Hi,

We use Lync/Skype for Business as the primary communications tool at my company, but for small project/team communications we use a self-hosted Mattermost server, because it's obviously 9000 times better than SFB.

However, Mattermost (especially the desktop client) does not integrate very well with Windows regarding the user's presence.

Short Scenario:
If I lock my computer, SFB immediately sets my presence to Away, meanwhile Mattermost doesn't.

On the other way around, if I minimize the Mattermost Desktop client to the tray, and I have an other application running on full-screen, after a short period, Mattermost goes to mark me as away, which is not true -- I'm still at my computer, but in an another application.
This is super inconvenient -- or are we doing something wrong?

Now, our workaround for this (which is super uncomfortable) is checking our colleague's status on SFB/Lync, then alt+tab back to Mattermost, and start/continue our conversation if they're available.

My proposal:

I did a little research, and I was happy to find out that SFB/Lync indeed has got a public API resource for querying user presences.
I put together a little python script (no golang competence yet, sorry) to test Microsoft's UCWA (https://ucwa.skype.com/about-ucwa), and I could easily get the presence of anybody in my organization/on my partner list.

My suggestion would be adding a new attribute to the User model class in Mattermost to map the existing users in Mattermost to their Skype for Business SIP address.
Also, write a server-side function which would query the presence of online Mattermost users each x seconds, and would return this presence info on the GUI (another small circle next to the internal Mattermost status, maybe?)

Also a question:
I do not know golang and I also don't know Mattermost's architecture yet, so please help me in this question:
If you decide not to implement this feature, would it be possible to integrate this into our instance as a 3rd-party plugin, and
can 3party plugins change the look of the GUI for all users -- what's are the main limitations?

Cheers!

The idea:

One can set their status to some arbitrary text, which will be shown next to your username.

Details:

The command


/status My new status


can be used to change your status, it will then appear next to your screen name in replies:

https://i.imgur.com/Sggqc59.png

If the text is too long, it is truncated and you need to hover to see the full status:

https://i.imgur.com/0GoP3HZ.png

Why:

It is incredibly useful to be able to see what your team mates are working on. Currently, our team are using a channel for this, but it's pretty inconvinient and quickly gets very messy. It'd be much nicer if this is just some updatable label integrated into mattermost.

Thanks for listening.