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Every AI assistant or automation connected to a messaging platform needs a way to act on your behalf: sending a message, managing a channel, pulling context from a conversation. Rocket.Chat 8.8 gives agents a standard way to do that with a native MCP server, so any MCP-compatible agent can work inside your workspace without your team building and maintaining a custom integration for it. This release also brings tighter security and more reliable calling.

Digital sovereignty has become one of the defining questions for European institutions. Governments, defence organizations, and public bodies across the continent are re-examining who controls the infrastructure their operations depend on, and increasingly, the answer matters more than where a server happens to sit.

Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration went live with federation on Rocket.Chat, chatting directly with Försäkringskassan, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, which runs another Matrix-based platform. Neither agency moved to a shared platform or routed messages through a third-party bridge. Each kept its own deployment, its own admin console, and its own security posture, and users on either side can now open a conversation with the other agency as if they were on the same system.

Coalition operations depend on XMPP. NATO's Federated Mission Networking (FMN) builds on it, it is a standing requirement in coalition RFPs, and it has carried mission communications for more than 20 years. With release 8.7, Rocket.Chat federates with XMPP, so organisations can coordinate with every partner on the mission network from a single sovereign platform. This release is the first step in a larger build: native XMPP federation, engineered into the platform rather than bolted on.

‍ Most organizations asking about data sovereignty are actually asking about data residency. Where are the servers? Is there a data center in Germany, France, or the Netherlands? The vendor says yes. The procurement box gets ticked. The conversation moves on. This is understandable. Geography is concrete and auditable. And residency does matter. What it does not do is answer every question sovereignty requires. That gap is where the real sovereignty conversation begins.

‍ A sovereign communications platform gives your organisation control over where its communications data lives, who can access it, and how it is protected. Getting that right matters more than it appears. Sovereignty in communications comes down to one thing: being in charge of your own data. Organisations manage that control in different ways.

The organizations that depend on Rocket.Chat operate with requirements that don't bend: access control has to be precise, presence has to reflect operational reality, and deployments have to meet the standards federal procurement demands. Version 8.6 advances all three. Here is what is new.