At TechEd, in early June, I announced our agreement to acquire InRelease – a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server by InCycle Software.  Since then, we’ve received tons of requests for more information, demos, etc.  Unfortunately, we’ve only been able to point people at InCycle because the acquisition was not final.  I’m happy to say that about a week ago we closed the acquisition and InRelease is now a part of Microsoft.

That doesn’t mean we can start selling it right away.  There are a number of things that have to happen in order to enable that – getting it on our price lists, shipping a version that is properly branded, serviceable, etc.  All of that will take a few months but there are some good options for you in the interim.  Let me share some of them.

  • We are providing a preview of our future Release Management product today.  It’s basically the existing InRelease product with some minimal changes to meet some of our compliance requirements.  You can download it here.  You can also read the InRelease Preview User Guide and ask questions on the forum.
  • InCycle Consulting will continue as an independent company and, until we ship the first fully Microsoft product, will continue to provide trials and sell the InRelease product.  Customers who purchase now will be provided a free upgrade to the Microsoft shipped version when it is available.  This is a good way to get started now and be sure that you also have a good path forward.

Hopefully these two paths will solve everyone’s needs while finish up the changes we need to make.

I also want to say a few words about licensing so you, at least, have a little context on what to expect.  We are not ready to announce pricing but I can share a bit about the structure of the licensing.

  • The InRelease release management authoring components will be included in Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.
  • Everything needed to participate in a release process (as opposed to configuring it) will be included in the Team Foundation Server CAL.
  • The InRelease server components will be integrated into Team Foundation Server 2013.
  • The InRelease deployers (which are required for each node you deploy on) will continue to be licensed separately.

For now, we are focused on getting InRelease integrated into our on premises product.  We will also support our cloud service but that will come a bit later.

Please give it a try and give us any feedback you have.  As you might imagine, we are currently working on developing and prioritizing our backlog.

Thanks,

Brian