This week, we are taking Meshcentral for the first time into a completely new direction with the introduction of user-to-user text messaging. This allows users to establish relationships and send chat messages to each other. For many years now, Meshcentral has been focused on user-to-machine interactions where administrators could manage remote devices over the internet, now we added new server behavior for user-to-user permissions and messaging. We now have a full server web API for managing user-to-user relations. The mesh team then built a completely new web application to take advantage of this API. Users of Meshcentral.com and other mesh server administrators will start seeing our new messaging feature show up in many places.
- Users can login to Meshcentral.com and use the new “My Friends” tab. From there, you can invite others, accept invitations and do text messaging. This is the easiest way to get started.
- Our updated Mesh Web Application is at Meshcentral.com/m. Allows both user messaging and device management for cell phones and tablets.
- Our new Mesh Application for Windows allows users to stay logged into the mesh server with a system tray background application.
Now for some technical details. The new user-to-user API’s are available in our html samples package, this allows other developers to build applications that take advantage of all of the new user API’s and all of our existing device management API. The team also integrated WebRTC into the web messaging application so that, when possible, WebRTC is automatically connected in a messaging session and all messages flow directly user-to-user without the server acting as the relay. Having WebRTC setup allows us to move forward with other usages in the future. The Mesh Windows application is actually the web application packaged within Node-Webkit. This powerful Intel sponsored project allows us to have the web application run as a native Windows application with full system tray support. The node application is also fully self-upgrading, so we expect to use this feature heavily to we find and fix issues with the application or release new feature. We also fully support browser notifications so that toast messages will show up on the screen (outside the browser) when another user changes state or sent a message.
Since this is our first release of the user-to-user feature, we do expect some issues and encourage anyone using the Mesh Messaging feature to give us feedback. Two notable people for this release, Matt Primrose and Rick Edgecombe have done piles of HTML/Javascript coding. Matt for the web application and Rick for getting us started with Node-Webkit and self-update system.
Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com
Our new messaging web application is available on a wide range of platforms.
From the main site, our web application and native node application.
When a messaging session is established between two users, the web application will
attempt to setup a WebRTC connection. If successful, messages flow directly between users.
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