Team Foundation Server 2008 and SharePoint Integration

Today I will talk about the relation between TFS and SharePoint. SharePoint provides the Team portal functionality needed by TFS to share documents and create team sites. In TFS 2005 Only SharePoint 2.0 is supported and this SharePoint by defaults need to be installed on the same machine as TFS Services.

In the New version we decided to make the Integration more flexible so we added support to SharePoint 3.0 and we relaxed the restriction on how SharePoint is installed and configured so there are two modes

  1. Using an existing up and running SharePoint on some machine. In that case Setup need two URLs to integrate with that SharePoint
    1. The SharePoint administration website URL https://<machine>:<port>
    2. The SharePoint managed path that TFS will use as the root for the team project sites. This URL looks like https://<machine>:<port>/<path>
  2. TFS Setup will install and configure SharePoint 3.0 on the same machine as the TFS is being installed

The only requirement on SharePoint is that if SharePoint is installed on a machine other than TFS a new Setup needs to run on the SharePoint machine. This new setup is called TFS WSS Extensions which will install the needed files on SharePoint to support TFS Functionality. Actually Sudhir has published a nice post about the relation between TFS and SharePoint I recommend reading it to understand more about our SharePoint integration

In addition to the changes in Setup, We added a new option in TFSAdminUtil that will help reconfiguring SharePoint integration in case SharePoint Upgrade or move. The new command is TFSAdminUtil ConfigureConnections that provide a way to configure the 4 pieces of information needed for SharePoint Integration

More interesting changes in my next post; so stay tuned