Helping me understand channels and defaults

Hello Forum,

I’m new to Mattermost and hope to better understand how to use it in our small office.

I’m planning on using Mattermost Team edition for our small office of approximately 10 people. And for 2 of our vendors as well so we can use Jitsi for video and screen sharing for support purposes.

I see when people login they are directed to the Town Square channel by default. If I setup a private channel for our employees to use, can I change the default channel for our employees so they are directed to this private channel first and not Town Square?

Same goes for our vendor. I was going to setup a private channel for each vendor so that any of our employees would be able to chat/video conference with the vendor from that channel. When a vendor logs in to our Mattermost, can I have them only see the channel that was setup for them and no other channels?

I suppose what I’m looking for as well is to turn off all public channels for our office as I don’t see a reason to have them for our usecase. Is this possible?

Secondly, our vendor has a number of support people and we may not know which one we will get when we open a support case and call them on the phone. What I would like to do is have our employee login to Mattermost, go into the private channel for that vendor and create a link the vendor will use to access our Mattermost site. Our employee will call the vendor and whomever they get the employee will send them an email with the link and while on the phone with them will give them the login username and password that support person from our vendor will use during this support call. Is this possible to do in Mattermost?

Thank you.

Hi, @greavette

Allow me to answer your questions here:

If I setup a private channel for our employees to use, can I change the default channel for our employees so they are directed to this private channel first and not Town Square?

The feature to set the default channel when a user joins a team is only available on the E20 offering under the Default Channels (Experimental)
section.

When a vendor logs in to our Mattermost, can I have them only see the channel that was setup for them and no other channels?

You can configure them to be Guests which is an E10/E20 offering too. On top of that, you can consider the usage of private channels only and limit the creation of channels to specific members only.

I suppose what I’m looking for as well is to turn off all public channels for our office as I don’t see a reason to have them for our usecase. Is this possible?

This feature is available under the E20 offering as you can see in the screen shot above.

What I would like to do is have our employee login to Mattermost, go into the private channel for that vendor and create a link the vendor will use to access our Mattermost site. Our employee will call the vendor and whomever they get the employee will send them an email with the link and while on the phone with them will give them the login username and password that support person from our vendor will use during this support call. Is this possible to do in Mattermost?

You can copy the link of the private channel and share it to the users BUT they need to already have permission to the team and before having access to the channel. Else, you need to consider the usage of Guests Accounts if you need something on the fly.

I would recommend you to request for an Enterprise trial - Pricing | Mattermost - and see if the features cater to all the requirements that you have. If you run into any issues or have any questions, please feel free to share it here.