The right messaging platform will unlock your team’s potential for advanced collaboration with powerful capabilities that drive increased efficiency, productivity, and velocity. The following considerations can help you define messaging requirements for your organization.
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Real-time messaging across the DevOps lifecycle
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What to look for in a messaging platform
Designed for developer collaboration
Take advantage of a messaging solution that’s designed from the ground up specifically for DevOps teams. These platforms are built by innovative software companies that put the collaboration needs of developers, system administrators and infrastructure operators first. They focus on delivering specific capabilities, such as integrating third-party tools that address the productivity hurdles DevOps teams face every day. With advanced collaboration as a core principle, these platforms also enable teams to explore new ways of working together and discover new opportunities to be more productive and efficient. Essentially, your messaging platform becomes the UI that drives your team’s daily DevOps workflows.
Centralized messaging for everyone
Eliminate disjointed communications between developers, systems administrators, and infrastructure teams across the company and beyond. By consolidating your DevOps messaging tools onto a single platform, everyone has access to what they need to stay productive: people, information, discussions, system alerts, bots, and more.
A central repository of knowledge
Put conversation histories at everyone’s fingertips. On a sophisticated messaging platform, discussions are persistent, threaded, and easily searchable, allowing users to review the end-to-end context of an event or decision. Teams have visibility into shared activities, and stakeholders can track the progress of a particular project or incident. Modern messaging platforms also provide granular access controls, so that only the right people have permission access specific conversations or to use specific channels.
A single source of truth
When crucial conversations only happen over email or in person, it becomes nearly impossible to track down the full story of a project. By creating a central hub
of persistent, searchable conversations, messaging platforms allow you to build a repository of information whose value grows over time. Team members or others who are new to a project can easily follow the project’s history by accessing past conversations and decisions that were made in the project or team channel.
Integrations with DevOps tools and workflows
Increase workflow automation by integrating data from your internal systems into specific messaging channels or rooms. Robust messaging platforms allow you to run bots that act on data in your systems directly from your collaboration workspace. They make third-party integrations simple and fast, allowing developers
to use a plug-in or web hooks to connect with the wide range of tools that they use regularly. They also provide an API or integration framework that enables connections with internal systems that are invisible to the internet. Most organizations also benefit from access to a large collection of prebuilt integrations, along with documentation that provides instructions and best practices.
Real-time alerts for faster response
Notify the right people the moment an incident or issue occurs. Automated alerts from your DevOps systems flow into a dedicated messaging channel, so teams can jump straight into collaborating on a response and stakeholders can easily follow their progress. Popular bots, like Hubot, can add logic to alerting use cases. While some infrastructure and monitoring systems can deliver hundreds or thousands of alerts into a single channel, having well documented support for bots allow teams to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to surface the most important machine-generated data to the right team, or even automate a response based on certain criteria.
Controlled privacy, security, and compliance
Reduce the risk of a data breach by eliminating rogue use of non-compliant messaging tools. Some modern platforms, such as Slack, only run in the public cloud. A truly enterprise-ready messaging platform will give you a choice of where you can host your deployment, whether it be on-premise, private cloud, or public cloud. With the self-hosted approach, running your messaging platform behind your company firewall enables you to comply with GDPR and other data security regulations, while giving IT control and ownership over confidential messaging data.
Advanced user experience
Enable users and teams to collaborate with a fluid, highly customizable user experience that supports their unique workflows and communication style. Leading messaging platforms offer an intuitive UI and superior performance. They also provide rich features that people love to use, and have come to expect, such as support for video and emojis, keyboard shortcuts, and advanced search. Cross-platform compatibility allows users to communicate via Mac, Windows, or Linux clients, iOS or Android devices, or a web browser.
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