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!

Make notifications for multi-person direct messages work the same as for single-person direct messages.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Direct Message section in the channel bar and click More...

Choose 2 names to send a message to and click Go

Type a message in the chat window

Expected behavior
On the recipients' clients, the taskbar icon should show a red dot with a number (eg: 1)
image

On the system tray icon, a red dot should appear.
image

Observed behavior
On the recipients' clients, the taskbar icon shows a red dot with a white dot in the middle
image

On the system tray icon, a blue dot appears.
image

Additional Information
I find that users respond to direct messages more readily than group channels. The way the notifications are currently working, the notifications for multi-person DMs look more like channel notifications and people aren't getting back to them as quickly. Sometimes, not at all.

I've opened a ticket in the MM GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/572