Can visualstudio.com be tied to Release Management Server?

Question

My team uses visualstudio.com (previously Team Foundation Services, a.k.a cloud-based TFS) and I'd like to also make use of Release Management Server. I think I know the answer is that this is only possible with an on-premises instance of Team Foundation Server but would like confirmation. I've found this statement from December 2013 but looking for any more recent info:

Team Foundation Server support:

• TFS 2010, TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 versions are supported with Release Management for Visual Studio 2013
• Visual Studio Online account not supported yet, we plan to add this capability soon.

Found at the bottom of this page: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/12/19/how-to-configure-team-foundation-server-with-release-management.aspx

Answer 1

There is no native integration. But as of Update 2, you can trigger a release from the command line. Which in turn will allow you to modify your build process (assuming your build agent is on-premise and not hosted) to trigger the release automatically. The following blog post provides details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/04/04/release-management-continuous-deployment-with-visual-studio-online-and-any-ci-systems.aspx

Update:

Microsoft is working on bringing the Release Management client features into the VSO Web inteface. This was announce in February and named as Release Management Service of this year and a working demo was show on \build of this year.

Source:

Latest Blog Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2015/04/29/release-management-announcements-at-build-2015.aspx

In depth demo of UI and new features (relevant part starts around minute 25): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/3-649