Product Roundup: What’s new in Rocket.Chat 6.6

Welcome to Rocket.Chat's first Product Roundup of 2024! Another year, another brand-new collection of updates crafted just for you!

Whether it's improved features for team collaboration or great news for those using Rocket.Chat to build their own in-app chat experiences, this roundup provides a glimpse into the advancements marking the beginning of a year filled with meaningful improvements. Let's jump right in!

Introducing the new Chat SDK for a faster and more customized development process

Big news first! We've rolled out a brand-new Chat SDK tailored to make developers' lives easier. This launch aims to deliver more customizable chat experiences for existing web and mobile applications, ensuring a smoother and faster development process overall.

Digging into the technical side, our latest SDK is crafted using TypeScript. This language choice ensures straightforward coding, improved readability, and effortless integration with existing frameworks. The static typing feature of TypeScript also enhances code quality and reliability, reducing bugs and making the code easier to understand and maintain.

‍Key technical features include:

Framework agnostic: While built in TypeScript, the SDK is framework agnostic, meaning it can be integrated into any existing JavaScript or TypeScript-based project, be it React, Angular, Vue, or Node.js backends.

Advanced Type Safety: Leveraging TypeScript's static typing to catch errors at compile time, reducing runtime issues and ensuring more predictable code behavior.

‍Comprehensive API Coverage: Full access to a wide range of chat functionalities, including message sending/receiving, user management, and more, all accessible through an easy-to-use API.

For developers, this means a more user-friendly coding journey, marked by improved performance, quicker development cycles, and an overall enhancement in the chat integration process.

Learn here on setting up the SDK.

Unveiling seamless UI control with Room Customization

Keeping the ball in the realm of updates on Chat Engine, for those who have chosen to embed Rocket.Chat capabilities into their app or website using an iframe, customizing the user interface is now more straightforward than ever. With our latest enhancement, Room Customization, you can seamlessly manage specific UI elements through the window.postMessage event. This provides you with smoother and more stable control over the customization of your chat window.

Think about different situations where you want to control specific features based on user roles. For instance, you might want to limit actions like file sending to users with specific roles. With this new capability, you can easily hide the corresponding component whenever a user with a designated role is identified.‍

Introducing Mod Perspective app

Making sure online communities are safe and positive is what content moderation is all about. It helps keep the platform trustworthy and safe by stopping harmful content from getting through. The task, however, is quite daunting and convoluted, due to varying opinions on offensiveness, the volume of content to review, and the disturbing nature of some content. This is where moderation apps make things easier.

We are introducing the Mod Perspective app to address a critical issue in online platforms today - the proliferation of harmful and toxic messages. By launching the Mod Perspective, we are taking a firm stance against such content. This app is important for making sure everyone communicates respectfully on Rocket.Chat. It makes sure that the content shared by users follows your workplace rules and guidelines.

The app that scans messages for toxicity and automatically flags, blocks, or deletes any toxic message that violates the moderation threshold in your workspace. Here are some of the capabilities of the app:

Toxicity scanning: The app regularly monitors all the designated rooms and scans messages to detect any abusive, offensive, or inappropriate content. It helps to identify toxicity in the interactions within the work environment in real-time.

Automated moderation: Based on the moderation threshold set by the admins, toxic messages will be automatically flagged, blocked, or deleted. This helps in maintaining a healthy and respectful communication environment.

Sensitivity controls: The admins can set the toxicity threshold according to their needs, thus providing more control over the moderating process. The app will restrict any user from sending messages if it crosses the set toxicity threshold.

The app is available for all the premium plans. It can be installed for free from our marketplace. Please refer to our technical documentation to get started with the app. 

Mentioning users who are not in the channel

Have you ever been in a situation where an individual asserts to have communicated with a specific person, while the other denies receiving any message? (PS: both were telling the truth!) In v6.6, these misunderstandings are set to become a thing of the past.

When you mention users who are not present in a specific room, now a range of options will be shown to handle this situation directly from the room: 

• You can promptly inform them through DM that you have mentioned them in a room they are not currently a part of 
• If you are not the administrator of the room, you can ask the admin to add the mentioned user(s) to the room
• If you have administrative privileges of the room, you can add these users to the room directly
• It’s also an option to leave the situation as is — in which case you will receive an automated bot notification that you have mentioned a user who is not part of the room.

View and manage reported users

We are introducing the ability to view and manage reported users. This information can be accessed through a new dedicated tab, ‘Reported Users’ under the Moderation dashboard. 

Upon reporting a user, specifics such as username, the date of account creation, their registered email address, the date when they were reported, the total number of reports against them, the roles assigned to the user, and the reason for reporting will be available for review.  To make it more actionable, options to deactivate the user and reset their avatar will be provided. Read our technical document for more information on this new addition.

This new feature offers workspace administrators and moderators with the following benefits:

• Comprehensive data access: It provides a greater context for the reported messages and users, making it easier to make well-informed decisions.‍
• Saving time and efforts: Actionable insights provide a direct course of action that can be taken against reported users directly from the dashboard.  ‍
• Single source of truth: The consolidated information on messages and users in one unified view simplifies tracking and managing reported users.  

This functionality underscores our commitment to providing an efficient, user-friendly platform where administrators and moderators can effectively handle reported issues, uphold community guidelines, and maintain a healthy digital environment.

Prevent accidental pinning of messages

You will now be asked for confirmation before pinning a message to a room. Thanks to one of our community members for this valuable contribution!

Sometimes, users may mistakenly pin messages or pin too many messages, causing clutter in the chat room. The confirmation prompt helps avoid this error, ensuring only intentional and relevant pins are made.  

Introducing PDF viewer for desktop apps

To provide a seamless user experience, we are now introducing a PDF viewer for the desktop app. This viewer gives you the flexibility to effortlessly jump back to any given conversation, and greater controls to forward the file, or even download it directly. This functionality will be ready for use following our upcoming version release for desktop app.

Resolved issues

The following bugs were fixed in Rocket.Chat 6.6:

1. An issue where the user's custom status was changing with changes in presence status has now been resolved.
   
2. Several issues associated with the Engagement Dashboard have been resolved — including the display of incorrect data for the latest day, inconsistencies in the UI when switching time zones, and issues with the display of Messages and Channels tab, among others.
   
3. The problems related to Atlassian Crowd integration not functioning have now been fixed.
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How to update your workspace to the latest Rocket.Chat version?

Self-managed workspaces

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

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.

Looking to get started? 

Install for free and use Rocket.Chat as long as you like on a limited scale. Switch to a paid plan as your team grows and unlock additional features.

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