Release management overview

Release management provides a wide range of applications and procedures for planning, designing, building, deploying, and testing releases in your data center. A flexible user interface enables you to create, assign, monitor, notify, and report the status of release tasks, leveraging a best-practice ITIL process.

For each of the major release phases, you perform key operations to ensure that each release is managed efficiently and effectively. Using release management, you can:

• As a service provider, define a release for a particular customer; you can further define the release as one that applies to a specific customer location. Based on your security settings, you can strictly segment customer data so that it is viewed only by authorized customers and employees.
• Plan and oversee the successful rollout of software and related hardware, centrally tracking the releases.
• Configure the flow of release activities to support your current processes.
• Agree to the exact content and rollout plan for a release, through liaison with change management.
• Assign activities and tasks based on roles, ensuring that the right people own the release steps.
• Organize and manage releases using job plans that are based on ITIL best practices.
• Dynamically customize release activities and tasks, responding to changing needs as they arise.
• View release status and pending tasks in real time.
• Adapt existing software repositories as Definitive Media Libraries (DMLs) that can be tapped for software distribution during a release.
• Schedule multiple rollouts targeting multiple configuration items (CIs) in a single release.
• Receive reports that show, for all of your releases, release progress, release status, and the CIs that are affected by the releases.

Best of all, you can achieve incremental value by adopting a process, growing and adapting the process at your own pace, and adding task automation to further reduce labor costs around defined release management pains.