Product Roundup: What’s new in Rocket.Chat 5.1

The month of July 2022 was one of Rocket.Chat's busiest. We shipped Matrix Federation, new Video Conference Call Manager, and much more! There’s no slowing down. For August, we have some exciting features under our belt that will enhance user experience and give you more security options to fortify your business from threats. 

In 5.1, we have given our homepage a new look and revamped a few product user interfaces to make it more intuitive and easy to navigate. Intending to integrate with the Google Workspace suite of apps, we launched the Google Meet app last month, and we are launching Google Drive this month. We have made exciting additions to our omnichannel offering that will ensure a seamless and better user experience.

Say hello to our brand-new homepage! 

We have given a brand-new look to our homepage which is the first screen you see as soon as you enter your workspace. This screen displays several cards that help you perform basic functions within Rocket.Chat such as adding users, creating channels, and joining rooms. The cards on this screen will vary depending on your role within the workspace. In the top-right corner, you will find the option to customize the entire layout and components of your homepage to cater to your organization’s unique needs.

A more secure approach to managing devices

The pandemic has changed the way businesses work by introducing mobility and flexibility. However, with this increased flexibility comes increased risks and complexity of managing devices. Unmanaged devices are a huge security risk to any business. 

Using Rocket.Chat, you can manage and control the devices linked to your workspace for enhanced security. With our device management capabilities, you can uncover potential security threats by monitoring when and where the devices are connecting from and their last activity. Every time a suspicious activity is detected, you will receive an email alert. Your workspace administrator can review the activity and mitigate the anomaly seamlessly by logging out of the device immediately. This will enable you to terminate such suspicious sessions and strengthen network security. 

New apps in our marketplace

Google Drive 

Google Drive is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to store files and access them from anywhere. You can upload, save and collaborate on a range of file types such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, audio, and video files. With this newest app in our marketplace, you can share files from Google Drive in your workspace, without having to switch tools. This integration makes it easy to directly create files on your Drive from within Rocket.Chat. The coolest part about this integration is how seamless it is to manage the sharing permissions of files from Rocket.Chat, so you can determine the accessibility of the shared files and set restrictions on the action anyone can perform. For a step-by-step guide on how to install and authorize this app, refer to our technical documentation. 

WhatsApp Sandbox 

Here’s a piece of good news for our WhatsApp channel users— you no longer have to purchase the app on our marketplace and sign up to the 360Dialog sandbox to be able to use the app during your trial period. Our partnership and product teams agreed to launch the WhatsApp Sandbox app that would empower our customers and partners with the ability to operate in a 360Dialog sandbox. In this case, the product will only work through a 360Dialog sandbox API and will be available on our marketplace for free.

Introducing an improved and intuitive UI 

We have made our user interface much more user-friendly and straightforward in a few places — the invoice section of your cloud workspace, and the marketplace apps view. 

The invoice section is revamped to accommodate additional relevant columns for a consolidated view of all your invoices with rich filtering capabilities. We have added new columns for each invoice — workspace, product, and status, with the ability to download multiple invoices in one go. 

The marketplace apps page will now list apps in a flexbox style. We have also introduced a new status filter to check the list of enabled and disabled apps. 

Rich filtering options in omnichannel conversations

The ability to filter conversations by custom field is now native to Rocket.Chat. The ability to search contacts is a key requirement for companies to build third-party applications that connect to our ecosystem to deal with specific business needs. With the newly expanded ability, you can now find contacts by custom fields as well, allowing external applications to search for contacts using custom fields. 

Configure your custom domain 

To all those who’ve hosted Rocket.Chat on the cloud, here’s something that will make your lives much easier. You can now change your cloud-hosted domain directly through the cloud portal. This applies only to our cloud customers, and not self-managed customers. 

How to update your workspace to the latest Rocket.Chat version?

SaaS workspaces

The release happens automatically on our cloud, so no further action is required from your side. However, remember that upgrading instances might take a few weeks, so don't hesitate to contact our support team if you need to update your version sooner. 

Self-managed workspaces

Depending on the installation mode, you might need to update your server manually. Check out our documentation for instructions.

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