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.

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!