Today Atlassian, the leading provider of enterprise collaboration software for product teams, announced its newest release of Stash, the premier on-site Git repository management system used by enterprises to take advantage of the flexibility of Git while maintaining control of code quality and development. Enterprise teams building software share and track three things — ideas (specifications and requirements), activity (work and tasks), and code. With improved performance and scale for large distributed teams, Stash 2.0 rounds out Atlassian’s tightly integrated enterprise offerings that include JIRA for issues management and Confluence for content collaboration. Companies such as Orbitz, Best Buy, HBO GO and Phillips are adding Stash to their Atlassian product portfolio to manage their migration to Git.
 
“Within a week of running a test instance of Stash, we decided to make the switch,” said Senior Engineer Alex Holtz of Orbitz, a leading online travel company. “We were already using JIRA, and as support for Git materialized in Atlassian software, we wanted to take advantage of all the out-of-the-box integration points these products were building for Git.”

Stash’s new enterprise functionality includes branch permissions that allow development teams to specify and manage an individual’s or a team’s access control to code. All code developed separately on a branch can be properly tested and reviewed before being merged into source. The new team collaboration features include @mentions and Markdown support, instantly bringing any team member into a code discussion and providing greater context for richer discussions and faster communications. Also, the new enterprise offering adds Atlassian’s 24/7 global enterprise support, membership to a global Stash enterprise user community and scale beyond 2,000 users in a single instance.
 
“We built Stash from the ground up, specifically for the enterprise,” said Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian. “Our enterprise customers want easy-to-use products to build better software faster, and with Stash 2.0 they can easily take advantage of the distributed nature of Git. Stash streamlines the management of multiple shared code repositories and improves the quality of merged changes. By leveraging this new wave of technology, Stash speeds development in the enterprise.”
 
“Our research strongly suggests that decentralized version control systems generally and Git specifically are supplanting the centralized systems that preceded them,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. “Employers that wish to attract and retain technical talent would do well to acknowledge the market’s preference for Git, as well as the technical advantages behind it, when selecting a VCS.”
 
Full Control of Git Workflow – in the Enterprise
Git makes it easy for any developer to contribute to code, but it comes at the price of control – especially in geographically dispersed corporate environments. As corporate projects grow, so do the number of contributors, stakeholders and code repositories those teams are contributing to. With all these moving parts, development teams need a central place for their source, and a process to keep it organized as it expands.
Stash offers fine-grained access control over repositories and branches to ensure quality code development. For example, depending on the needs of the team, write access can be restricted to certain branches, or based on users, groups or specific branch names. With Stash, pattern restrictions can be used to prevent branch deletion or to limit branch creation.  Branch permissions can also be used to restrict access to branches within a repository, replacing the need for forks for developers more comfortable working with a single repository. Stash’s simple user interface (UI) helps teams easily manage Git-based development workflows.
 
More Contextual Conversations for Faster, Collaborative Development
Stash now offers two new collaboration features that can bring specific users into a discussion and add more context to any comment. Stash’s @mention feature can be used in global or inline comments. Users will receive an email notification when they are mentioned. Code discussions then take place inside of Stash and are preserved and available for team members to view.

With Stash’s new Markdown support, additional context through formatted text, links or code examples can be added to discussions via markdown. Screenshots can be used to enhance discussions on UI-focused features.
 
Availability
Stash 2.0 and the Stash Enterprise offering are immediately available for download at http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/download. Enterprise tiers add Atlassian’s 24/7 global enterprise support, membership to a global Stash enterprise user community and scale beyond 2,000 users in a single instance.