InRelease 3.0 has been released for a little over a week now and we are very happy with it. During the launch webinar, I presented the main goals behind "three". Last week I was at the ALM Summit and had many conversations about InRelease and I visited with current InRelease users this week. These discussions made me realize that the reasoning behind the product is of interest, so I decided to write this blog.
The mission of InRelease 3 hasn't changed - help .NET development teams deliver early and deliver often to their customers. What this meant is this version was:
- Simplify configuration
- Support more complex deployment scenarios
- Integrate even more with Microsoft technologies
- Improve user experience
Now, these first 2 goals may seem contradictory, probably because they are.
Main features aligned with InRelease 3 goals
Visual Deployment Editor
While working with development, QA and operations teams, we quickly realized that the two main release management challenges was to define complex deployment scenarios through multiple environments in a simple way. So, process visualization became part of the solution with the new deployment designer. Teams are now able to drag and drop boxes that represent what they want to achieve for each environment, even parallel automated deployments on different servers. You will notice that our Editor feels very familiar to Team Build users, on purpose.
Automated Deployment Toolbox
The other part of the solution was to save time to the team by providing a toolbox to "compose" their deployments. Many actions you may want to perform as part of a deployment are fairly standard and were added as an inventory of premade actions that you drag and drop on your deployment procedure. Teams can still add their own actions to the inventory for things specific to the application, but they do not need to spend time figuring out the common actions, their already done. With the new inventory of deployment actions, development teams can realize any deployment scenarios as simple as stop, run, create a copy, trigger automated tests and even roll back etc... anything you were performing manually on servers will be taken care by InRelease.
Support the build-deploy-test-release process in Visual Studio
Automate the release process for .NET teams is a challenging goal. This means to have a deep understanding of the most popular Microsoft Technologies and figure out how to support them all! Today, creating scripts to deploy SQL databases, Windows, Web-IIS, biztalk or SharePoint applications should not be one of your teams' challenges but ours. We already have solutions for the main technologies and are planning to build deployers for Bizztalk and SharePoint during this spring.
In addition to that, our goal is to complement and leverage Visual Studio with its packaging, test and deployment offerings. Working with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server since the first version in 2005 as a Gold ALM partner helped us a lot increase our knowledge and ability to think ahead. Supporting deployments in Windows Azure and being able to trigger automated tests with Test Manager were part of our fundamentals for InRelease. And the best is coming soon: release notes attached to work items, automate deployment with provisionning labs etc... stay tunned!
More intuitive experience
New generations probably never had to read a user guide before using an application or a mobile phone. Even if InRelease is a complex solution that solves a complex problem, it still requires to be as simple as a common application, even for outstanding people! The team worked hard to improve the user experience with a better flow within the application thanks to pop-up windows and a new vocabulary. InRelease 3.0 has now a wizard for first release that guides team step by step from configuring the application up to doing a first release. The web application that looks like Visual Studio is part of offering a better experience wherever customers are and will be reinforced with additional features available in it.
Security enhancements
Better collaboration between people usually raises flags for administrators as it involves company policies. InRelease is not only made for small teams but for enterprise companies with its robust workflow that is fully configurable and manageable for security purposes. To answer our customer needs, we added additionnal layers of permissions between roles and provides the ability to have a second range of approval gates on the deployment Template. Last but not least, InRelease 3.1 coming in 3 weeks will provide integration with Active Directories in order to manage InRelease security groups.
We hope you enjoy all these exciting improvements and are looking forward to your feedback. To read the full release notes, just click here. For those who are not familiar with InRelease, we invite you to try it for free!
