When Microsoft Corp. announced plans to acquire GitHub last month, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said one of his objectives is to widen the adoption of the service among enterprise developers. Today marked a milestone toward that goal.  

GitHub this morning launched new features for the enterprise tier of its code hosting platform to ease software teams’ day-to-day work. The main highlight is a “unified search” tool that lets developers directly browse and access outside code repositories for the first time.

Previously, GitHub Enterprise provided no straightforward way to interact with projects hosted outside a company’s private deployment. The reason why that’s significant is that an estimated 96 percent of applications use open-source software and GitHub is where most of this software is hosted. By making it easier for developers to interact with outside code repositories, the soon-to-be Microsoft subsidiary is easing access to an immensely important asset.

GitHub today also introduced enhancements focused on making large software projects more manageable. Development teams can now create templates for different types of code contributions, such as bug fixes and feature additions, to ease the review process. In the same spirit, GitHub has added the ability to require that multiple people check a piece of code before it’s added to part of an application.

Most of the other changes are usability improvements. There’s a new option that lets users filter unnecessary white space from code files to make them more readable, while a number of developer and administrator dashboards have received viewability tweaks too.

Today’s new features represent the biggest update that GitHub has released since its acquisition by Microsoft was announced. It’s safe to assume the code-hosting provider will continue adding more enterprise-focused capabilities, likely at an increased rate, once the $7.5 billion deal closes later this year.

Some members of the developer community have expressed concerns about the direction that GitHub will take following the acquisition. This suspicion stems from the adversarial relationship that Microsoft had with the open-source community before Satya Nadella took the reins in 2014. But under Nadella, the company has actively embraced that community, releasing the code for several core technologies, including the .NET programming language.

Image: Microsoft