The popular Microsoft-owned software development platform GitHub is revamping the premium version of its offering with what it calls new experience updates and streamlined administrative capabilities.

GitHub is a web-based version-control and collaboration platform for software developers. It’s used to store the source code for different projects and track the complete history of all changes to their code. It allows developers to collaborate on a project more effectively by providing tools for managing possibly conflicting changes from multiple developers.

GitHub allows developers to change, adapt and improve software from its public repositories for free, but it charges for private repositories, offering various paid plans. Each public or private repository contains all of a project’s files, as well as each file’s revision history. Repositories can have multiple collaborators and can be either public or private.

Microsoft, the biggest single contributor to GitHub, acquired the service for $7.5 billion in the summer of 2018.

Today’s GitHub Enterprise 2.16 release is the first update to GitHub’s paid offering since it combined its Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Server platforms earlier this month. The new capabilities are intended to help developers save time and simplify team and repository administration.

On the experience side, GitHub is introducing new features such as “force pushing” workflows that help project maintainers better keep track of what other collaborators may be doing. Issue template automation is another new feature, allowing maintainers to add default title, labels and assignees to their projects. The updated platform also now indicates if review comments are outdated from more recent code changes, helping save developers time.

Meanwhile, GitHub Enterprise administrators gain more tools with repository creation permissions. With the update, permission to create additional repositories, whether public or private, can be defined at the instance and organization level. In addition, admins can now grant users the ability to manage individual or all GitHub Apps in their organization based on that individual organization’s needs. This means it’s no longer necessary to grant owner privileges to individual team members in each organization, GitHub said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said it’s a positive for Microsoft to put its foot on the gas pedal following the criticism surrounding its acquisition of GitHub.

“The next roadmap deliveries will still be met with skeptical eyes and ears, but if Microsoft and GitHub keep delivering, these concerns will go away,” Mueller said.

Image: GitHub