Summary of "Roadmap Reveal: Secure CommsOS™ Edition"
Summary of "Roadmap Reveal: Secure CommsOS™ Edition"
Overview: This video presents Rocket Chat’s roughly annual roadmap update, focusing on the evolution and future plans of their Secure CommsOS™ platform. The session highlights ongoing development, upcoming features for 2025, and the company’s commitment to secure, sovereign communications with strong community engagement.
Key Technological Concepts and Product Features:
- Secure CommsOS™ Platform Vision:
- Rocket Chat positions itself as a secure, sovereign communications operating system (CommsOS) for mission-critical operations across organizations of all sizes.
- The platform integrates messaging, voice, video, AI, apps, and extensive integrations to support secure collaboration.
- Emphasis on data ownership: organizations fully own their workspace, data, and connectivity decisions (including air-gapped environments).
- Deployment flexibility: self-managed, cloud, or hosted single-tenant environments with portability.
- Open Source and Licensing Model:
- Core Rocket Chat is MIT open source.
- Commercial/enterprise features are source-available but require licenses.
- Dual licensing model supports both open-source community and commercial users.
- Starter plan offers free access to commercial features for small teams (up to 50 users), fostering community growth and feedback.
- Native Matrix Federation (Available August 2025):
- Transition from external Matrix homeserver to a native Matrix protocol federation built directly into Rocket Chat.
- Benefits: improved performance, scalability, no extra deployment assets, and enhanced federation features.
- Supports federation across Rocket Chat workspaces and other Matrix-compliant platforms.
- Future plans to extend federation to other protocols like XMPP.
- Workspace Event Logging and Audit:
- Introduced in version 7.5 with backend APIs; front-end UI for admin review coming in 7.6.
- Logs all configuration and setting changes with timestamps and user info.
- Important for secure, mission-critical operations needing audit trails.
- Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC):
- Moving from custom Apps Engine solutions to core platform support.
- NIST SP800 compliant model focusing initially on security clearance use cases.
- Enables dynamic access controls based on attributes like location, time, device, etc.
- Enhanced Navigation and User Experience:
- Designed for large-scale workspaces with many rooms, channels, threads, and discussions.
- Features include:
- Second-level navigation sidebar showing hierarchical relationships (teams → channels → discussions).
- Global header for quick access to recent items and key features.
- Navigation filters for mentions, starred rooms, etc.
- Compliance with WCAG accessibility standards (VPAT statements available).
- Gradual rollout under feature preview to reduce user disruption.
- Future capabilities include tagging messages for personal organization and intelligent search across all conversations (planned for second half of 2024).
- VoIP and Video Conferencing Updates:
- VoIP launched in 2024, currently in beta with improvements to UI (e.g., draggable floating call controls).
- Embedded Rocket Chat chat within video conferences (e.g., Pexip integration) to replace native conference chat.
- Enables record retention of conference chats, critical for government and regulated entities.
- Expanding support for meetings initiated outside Rocket Chat (e.g., Outlook calendar).
- Rocket Chat AI:
- Focus on AI as a productivity tool, fully self-managed on-premises to ensure data privacy.
- Model-agnostic support (LLaMA and others).
- Features:
- Streaming AI responses.
- Agentic connectors for advanced AI behaviors (RAG, function calling).
- Conversation summarization available now.
- Knowledge-based Q&A with customizable RAG pipelines.
- Upcoming fully self-managed live translations (replacing cloud services).
- Extensible prompt guardrails and source attribution for AI responses to ensure accuracy and transparency.
- Omni Channel and Outbound Communications:
- Traditionally reactive (responding to inbound messages).
- New outbound communication features coming in 2024:
- Person-to-person outbound messages (e.g., appointment reminders).
- Campaign-based outbound messaging with personalized content.
- Multi-tenancy and Microservices Architecture:
- Full multi-tenancy is not currently prioritized.
- Logical separations exist for teams and business units.
- Microservices architecture evolving, enabling some resource sharing across tenants on enterprise licenses.
- Future architectural changes will allow separate admin frontends and backend components to enhance security and manageability.
- Security and Sovereignty Focus:
- Rocket Chat emphasizes data sovereignty, privacy, and secure deployment models.
- Open source and source-available code allows for full audits.
- Collaborations with security specialists and vulnerability testing partners.
- Customers control connectivity and deployment environments to avoid unwanted oversight or intrusion.
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