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

Answer 2

Release Management is not available yet for Visual Studio Online.

As you pointed out, they are busy working on it, but there have been no concrete announcements as to when it is planned to be released.