What matters most

Thursday’s email about the delivery company triggered a couple of responses, both with essentially the same question: why Mattermost? Why not Signal, Element, or any other of the zillion chat-like apps out there?

I understand how that choice can seem strange at first glance, particularly when the Mattermost website looks like some sort of national security/military contractor. But, if you ignore the gravitas, the software itself ressembles everyday office apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

So, why that one?

On a technical level, it’s easy to deploy as it’s what’s referred to as a “monolithic architecture”: one single package and a database on the server.

The mobile app can easily be pre-configured for drivers with all the needed settings and flows.

For auditing, there’s server-side retention of all the conversations and more. It’s easy to backup and easy to search; exactly what gets compliance people excited.

It’s also got these things called Playbooks. When there’s a breakdown or a delay, the driver can trigger predefined playbooks for these particular cases. Or, in the everyday rhythm of things, they can be steps like pickup, transit, arrival. No plans for using this yet, but ideas exist.

Colin