Team Foundation Service Update – Nov 19th

Brian Harry

Sprint 39 is now done and deployed.  As always, you can see the latest on the service on the service release notes: http://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/home/news/

Sprint 39 was another modest release.  We went through a pretty big reorganization after VS 2012 shipped and it has taken a couple of months to get all of the new teams formed, get there plans settled and get moving quickly.  RTMing the service a few weeks ago also took a fair amount of behind the scenes work.  So other than a few big things we’re not quite ready to announce yet, other visible improvements have been fewer than I’d like.

The biggest improvement in this deployment was the reincarnation of the ability to email work item info from within the web UI.  That’s a feature we had in 2010 but lost in 2012.  The reason we lost it was that we did pretty much a re-write of the web UI with more modern web practices and we just weren’t quite able to get all of the features back.  At this point, I think we have all but a few.  You can read the release notes for more.

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Another minor change we made was to the account landing page.  Much to my chagrin, far too many people create an account and then never go on to create a project.  We have a theory that the problem is that it is way too hard to discover how to or even that you need to create a team project.  We’ve re-done this page (where you land after creating an account) to hopefully make it much more obvious that you need to create a Team Project.  We got further plans to make this page much better but this was a short term modest improvement.

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Our single biggest support request over the past couple of months has been from people wanting to rename their accounts.  We can do that but it has been something our operations team had to do.  Of course that’s a bad solution.  So in Sprint 39, we built the support necessary to enable the “front line” customer support team to do it themselves.  In Sprint 40, we’ll be building a UI over that to enable customers to do it without ever contacting support.

Things are likely to stay a little low key through the holidays but I expect we’re going to come out swinging in January with some major new capabilities that I think you’ll be excited about.  Stay tuned.

Brian

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