I have been working with Visual Studio Team System since the public Beta came out so the possibility of customizing, reconfiguring and extending Team System was not new for me. Unfortunately I am slightly disappointed with the content of this White Board Discussion since I have been looking forward to hearing how others are implementing Team System, I was expecting more information and tips on actually getting management buy-in and best practices for process adoption. We are in the middle of rolling out Team System for our Microsoft development projects so I know that the real value of Team System can only really be realized when you customize your setup. But at the same time it was good to hear that the work that we are doing thinking about how to customize Team System and our Team Foundation Server setup is what others also are thinking about.
Right now the state of our setup is the following:
- Team Foundation Server setup with SSL over multiple dns names. This was no trivial task since there was no official documentation for setting up TFS with SSL when we did this. Now there is a step-by-step guide on MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms242875.aspx. Additionaly you need to “hack” your IIS and TFS configuration if you want it to work. Perhaps I will get back to this in a future post.
- ScrumForTeamSystem (http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/). Since we have a couple of projects that use Scrum it made sense to have a process template that supports Scrum.
- TeamPlain Web Access (http://www.teamplain.com/). We are still evaluating this and although it works quite well, I am not sure that it is right for our use.
- FlexWiki (http://www.flexwiki.com/). I have come to love Wikis for simplifying and reducing the friction to start writing documentation of our systems. We have integrated FlexWiki into our SharePoint portal sites by simply adding a Page Viewer WebPart with a large height.
- SharePoint hotfix 915746 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915746). Without this hotfix you cannot add new Web Parts to you portal sites.
New features that we are looking at implementing:
- Custom Process Templates and work items. We have a project on our Team Foundation Server for Team Foundation Server customization (almost a meta project).
- Implementing some ideas from Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/). Mainly a changelog WebPart for aggregating a change history for our WorkItems, source code, portal documents, Wiki pages. This could probably be implemented as an RSS aggregator.
- One-stop dashboard in Sharepoint for a quick overview of the state of everything in our project.
- RSS feed for changes to make it easier for developers to participate in different parallel projects.
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