I’m excited to announce that we’ve just released Otter 2022 and that the first prerelease of ProGet 2022 will be shipping later this week. 

In this article, I’ll talk about:

• Our new Release Numbering Scheme
• Otter Basic Edition, and other features of Otter 2022
• What to expect in ProGet 2022 and beyond

A Release Numbering Scheme

These releases follow our new, year-based number scheme, which aligns with how we’ve been releasing software for many years now:

• Major Releases ship annually and often implements new features or overhaul existing ones
• Maintenance Releases ship 2+ each month and have backward-compatible enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches

We do our best to make only low-risk changes to maintenance releases, and rarely see regressions as a result. Major releases include things like platform changes (e.g. we’re all .NET6 now!), and we do our best to write detailed upgrade notes that walk you through the risks and mitigation. For example:

• Upgrading to Otter 2022
• Upgrading to ProGet 2022

Introducing Otter Basic Edition

A lot of customers are using Otter to Create a GUI for their Scripts with Input Forms that do things like:

• Provision of new environments and servers
• Install Chocolatey packages across all their servers
• Deploy new router configuration
• Create and test Hyper-V machines

This lets end-users (developers, testers, etc.) run those scripts safely against dozens or hundreds of servers in their organization, all with access control, Git-based storage, centralized logging, etc. The scripts also run as scheduled jobs, or via the API.

Many folks will use their existing scripts – PowerShell (.ps1), Shell (Bash), Windows Batch (.bat), and Python (.py) – and then OtterScript for advanced, multi-server orchestration.

Otter Basic was designed to do all this – and it starts at $2,995 for up to 100 servers. And of course, you can do all of this (without the access control) in Otter Free.

SAML Support & Security Management

We’ve added some more flexibility for logging in to Otter and made it a lot easier to manage security:

• Improved UI for managing security and users
• Allow multiple user directories to be searched at once
• Integrate with SAML providers like Azure and PingID
• Import/export Permissions and Built-in Users
• Enable multiple login options at once: Built-in Username/passwords, Windows Authentication, SAML Authentication

Brand New OtterScript Editor

We’ve completely rewritten the OtterScript editor! In addition to vastly improved usability, we’ve added:

• New “statement searcher” that makes it easier to find your scripts or operations
• Automatic saving of draft changes, with the ability to come back and edit later
• Commit/review changes before finalizing/saving
• Autocomplete (i.e. like IntelliSense) when editing OtterScript in Text Mode

We’ll be moving these changes to BuildMaster 2022 later this year. Speaking of our other products…

ProGet 2022 is coming!

The first prerelease of ProGet 2022 is scheduled for later this week. But to be honest, I’m probably more excited about this first milestone than you are. M1 will have nearly identical functionality to ProGet 6.0, but the main difference is that everything is now on .NET6 instead of .NET Framework 4.5.2 (Windows) and .NET 5 (Linux).

We’re releasing this to get ahead on platform testing. We plan to make this the default option for new ProGet installations and will upgrade our own production servers. We don’t recommend upgrading your production servers to it just yet.

In a couple weeks, I’ll write another article about the new features to expect:

• Replication of UI overhaul and performance improvements
• ProGet Edge Computing Edition
• SAML & Security Management overhaul
• Software Bill of Material (SBOM) Repository

Some of our touched Upgrading to ProGet 2022 guide.

BuildMaster 2022 is in the works

I don’t have a ton of details to share on BuildMaster 2022 just yet, but we’ll be incorporating the new OtterScript editor and the SAML/Security changes.

I’m also working on a new onboarding experience to make it easier to create CI/CD pipelines for new applications, and show how to integrate with more tools for static analysis and testing.

But I’d also like to see how we can integrate compliance into those pipelines – perhaps showing which licenses the applications are consuming, or the vulnerabilities in the open-source packages you use.

I’d love to get your Feedback!

All of our releases and many of the things we do here at Inedo — including the year-based versioning scheme — are a direct result of user feedback.

This is because we’re part of a very small minority of independent software vendors whose money comes the old-fashioned way: by creating products that our users love enough to purchase. You are our investors — and our features, products, and future are determined by you, our customers.

Don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you have ideas or issues you’d like to share.

Email: apapadimoulis at inedo dot com