Nexus Professional 2.0.5 Released: It's Easier to Evaluate Awesomeness

Nexus Pro has enhanced search capabilities that make it easy to identify which components are popular versus which components you might want to avoid.

With Nexus Pro you can track your exposure to security vulnerabilities and licensing issues. With Nexus Pro you gain control over your releases so you can place release candidate binaries in a temporary staging repository while QA tests and qualifies a release. With Nexus Pro you can control which OSS components you allow into your organization with Procurement. You can proxy the most popular source of components for Java developers (Central) alongside the most popular source of OSS components for .NET developers (NuGet Gallery). If you have distributed teams you can set up two Nexus instances and setup a Smart Proxy so that your distributed teams are always working with the latest artifacts in a distributed environment.

This impressive list of features is only available to you if you can sit down and evaluate these features and come to your own conclusions. Some of our customers take the time to go through the motions of an evaluation, but many are asking for an easier evaluation experience. In the 2.0.5 release, we've done just that.

A few months ago the engineering team took a long look at Nexus Professional from the perspective of a new user. What does it take to get started? What were the assumptions we were making about what users know before they download the product? And, how can we make it easier to evaluate the product?

After this exercise it became clear to us that we needed to make sure our Nexus Professional trial bundle contained a few preconfigured features along with a set of simple example projects.

Put simply, it has to be easier to evaluate the product. Our new Nexus Professional bundle "forward deploys" the following features:

• Nexus has been preconfigured to download the search index from Central. Download Nexus Professional and give it a few minutes to download the index from Central . Once downloaded, you can start searching for artifacts. Since Nexus Professional adds valuable information to the search interface, we wanted to make sure this data was available immediately without asking users to click through a flurry of configuration screens.
• A Staging profile has been configured to demonstrate release management. Since Staging is a primary draw for many of our customers, this version takes a step toward making it easier for a first time user to understand Staging. A Staging profile has been configured, and a sample project has been configured to stage an artifact to this profile. A new user can deploy and release via this Staging profile without having to run through pages and pages of introduction and configuration instructions.
• Procurement has been preconfigured so you can quickly define rules for the OSS components. If you need to control your OSS components, this Nexus Professional trial bundle creates a procured repository and adds this repository to your Public group. If you need to start procuring artifacts, Procurement is up and running.
• Nexus proxies NuGet Gallery so that you can quickly evaluate support for .NET development. This is one of the most important changes. Our Nexus Professional bundle ships with no .NET repositories configured and we were asking users to jump through pages and pages of instructions. With this trial bundle, NuGet Gallery is proxied, a new NuGet hosted repository is available, and these two repositories are combined into a NuGet group. To start using Nexus for .NET all you need to do is copy the NuGet API key into Visual Studio for authentication.

In addition to these configuration changes to our Nexus Professional trial, users can now download two simple Maven projects that are preconfigured to download and deploy artifacts from and to a local Nexus Professional instance along with a short evaluation guide to walk you through the process. Download Nexus Professional today and get started.