How Can I Use Mattermost to Improve Communication in a Global Team with 'What's My Country'?

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I’ve recently been exploring different tools to enhance the communication within our team, which is spread out across multiple countries. One challenge we’ve encountered is managing time zones and understanding the location context of our team members during discussions. For instance, knowing where someone is located can help us schedule meetings more effectively and understand their local work hours better.

While using Mattermost for our team chats and collaboration, I came across a tool called “what’s my country” which helps determine a user’s country based on their IP address. This got me thinking about how I could potentially integrate or use this information within Mattermost to improve our team’s communication.

Has anyone here found a way to incorporate location data like that provided by “What’s My Country” into Mattermost? For example, I’m curious if it’s possible to automate a way to display a team member’s country or time zone in their profile or alongside their messages. This could be particularly helpful for quick check-ins or when we need to understand the context of someone’s availability without needing to ask them directly.

Also, does Mattermost have any existing integrations or plugins that might support something like this? I’ve seen various plugins for other tasks, but nothing specific to geolocation or time zone management. If anyone has experience with using plugins or customizations for displaying user-specific information like this, I’d love to hear your insights.

Moreover, how does the community generally handle the challenge of coordinating across different time zones using Mattermost? Are there best practices or features within Mattermost that I might have overlooked which could help with this issue? Any advice on setting up reminders or notifications based on a user’s local time would also be appreciated.

I’m looking forward to hearing how others have navigated this challenge and any suggestions you might have for making the most of Mattermost in a globally distributed team context. Thanks in advance!

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Hi Xenokrates! First off: Welcome to the Mattermost Forums!

Second: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on improving communication in a global team! You might consider checking out the Walltime Plugin. Additionally, our Custom Status feature allows team members to indicate their availability based on their local time, which might be useful for coordinating across different time zones. I hope this helps, and feel free to reach out if you have more questions or need further assistance!