http://www.mattermost.org/I just installed gitlab for my development team. Gitlab uses a chat tool called mattermost which is similar to slack. What if OST created a dynamic mattermost chat room for each new ticket and embedded that chat in the ticket. Just like OST does a great job of consolidating email communication into one thread, this would give OST the unique capability of bringing tickets to chat communication.It wouldn't be hard from a design perspective. Each time a new ticket is made in an open status, the system calls mattermost api to create a new chatroom and invites all parties on the ticket. Then it puts the link in the ticket details and/or even embeds the chat in a tab where the thread is. Chat is a much more relaxed and realtime form of communication and people are going to use it. But if they do, your ticket doesn't know anything about it unless people copy and paste the chat log in the ticket. People probably wont do that.Then when the ticket is closed, the mattermost API call is made to dispose of the chatroom. There are many options for this. I don't know if mattermost lets you just deactivate it but keep the history but that would be ideal so it can be reopened. Otherwise, OST just copies the data into the thread. Not too hard either way.You could add configuration options to let people choose chat as their notification setting rather than email. I hate emails cluttering my inbox. Emails suck and are hard to keep track of, that's why we use OST! Let me choose to receive event notifications via chat instead.These chatrooms could also be dynamically created for each department and team. Team specific notifications go to the team chat, department to the department chat and agent to a chat that is just for the agent and the OST system.Taking it to the next level:This leads to a lot of new possibilities. There is a new concept called chatops. This is basically using chat as a command interface. You can make it really easy to interact with the notification you just received by replying to it. So if you get a notification, you could say "chatbot remind me in an hour" and it would repeat the notification. Or "chatbot claim ticket". The possibilities are pretty endless and end users could design their own commands.Integration with GitLab:OST is great for ticketing. But it's not really a bug tracker tool. Gitlab is, though. So if someone reports an issue to the helpdesk and it gets escalated to a developer and the dev finds that it is a bug, it would be nice to move that to a bug tracker like on gitlab. Integration to do this automagically would be awesome.Thoughts?
