Microsoft Harvests TeamPlain

If you're using Microsoft Team Foundation Server to manage your software projects - version control, schedules, project documents, and so on, you probably noticed that Microsoft didn't provide web-based access to TFS. This was most unfortunate given the number of non-developers such as project leads, documentation specialists, quality assurance, and other personnel who need access to the information in TFS but don't want to be forced to use Team Explorer. From my own experience, walking a non-developer through how to install Team Explorer, configure it and use it is not a straightforward task. There are many steps that can go wrong and you end up with endless calls that files can't be accessed, files are being extracted to the wrong location, and so on.

However, there was a 3rd party solution developed by devBiz Business Solutions called TeamPlain - Web Access for Team System that allowed using the browser to access all of the information in TFS. All a user needed to do was connect to the internal portal site hosting TeamPlain which handled connecting to the TFS system on the network and translating forms, reports, etc that reside in TFS into browser friendly (and nice looking) pages.

The pricing was somewhat steep particularly for smaller shops or those with limited budgets. But if web access to TFS was paramount, then TeamPlain would be a great solution. However, the clamor from teams for a web-based solution apparently got Microsoft's attention because on March 26, 2007 Microsoft acquired devBiz along with TeamPlain and is adding it to the standard TFS package.

Even better, it's now free!

An updated version (v2) of TeamPlain was under development by devBiz, and Microsoft has announced that it will be released in the Orca timeframe. But the advantage of Microsoft buying TeamPlain now is that you can freely install and use the software.

I've been using it in my projects for a while now and it's a super way to access TFS even if you use Team Explorer for day-to-day work in Visual Studio. I highly recommend giving it a look.

http://www.devbiz.com

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 12:17 PM  Permalink