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Team Foundation Power Tools 2012

Microsoft released a TFS 2012 version of Team Foundation Power Tools.

What’s new?

• Storyboard Shapes Power Tool:  a command line tool for creating dynamically sizeable storyboard shapes.
• Team Members: the Team Member s tab is the biggest change in the Power Toll, its better integrated with TFS’s groups and identities and much better looking.

What’s missing?

• Work Item Alerts:  now included in Team Web Access
• Checking Comment Policy: now included in VS 2012
• Rollback: now included in VS 2012
• Work Item Search: now included in Team Explorer 2012

The old tools, the Best Practices Analyzer, the Process template manager, Team Foundation backups and so on still exist and are of course modified for TFS 2012.

Download it here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/b1ef7eb2-e084-4cb8-9bc7-06c3bad9148f

 

Some features of Team Web Access are not visible…

The first time you log in to TFS Web Access after installing TFS 2012 you might get the message “Some features of Team Web Access are not visible to you”. If you click show details you will see “In order to use all the features of Team Web Access, you must have the correct license and configuration. For more information”

To add users to the correct group first click “Administer Server”

Then click “Control Panel”, “Web Access” and “Limited”, “Full” or “Standard” depending on the group you want to add your users/AD-groups to.

• Limited:
  • This level of access restricts the user so that they can only view work items that they create in Team Web Access (also known as Work Item Only View). No other features, such as team pages, are available to users in this group. For more information, see Manage Work Items in Work Item Only View (Team Web Access).
  • No client access license (CAL) is required for this level of Team Web Access.
• Standard:
  • This is the default level of access in Team Web Access for your users. Members of this group can view all Team Web Access features except for:
    • sprint planning and backlog views
    • any of the features for requesting feedback from users and managing that feedback
  • A Team Foundation Server (TFS) CAL is required for all users with this level.
• Full:
  • This level is reserved for users who are licensed to use all features available in Team Web Access, including the sprint planning and backlog management tools and the Request and Manage Feedback tools.
  • To use these features, your user must be licensed for one of the following MSDN subscriptions: Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN, Visual Studio Premium with MSDN, or Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN. These MSDN subscriptions each include a TFS CAL for the subscriber.

Read More in MSDN

 

Kanban support in Team Foundation Service

In the latest service update of Microsoft online version of Team Foundation Server called Team Foundation Service Microsoft have added a Kanban board.

To go to the Kanban board select Work from the Team Foundation Service web.

Select board next to backlog items

Here we our PBIs order by priority and four lanes based on the state model of the PBI (NEW, APPROVED, COMMITED and DONE).

We can of course use drag-and-drop to move our PBIs between the lanes

You can also change the WIP limit of the lanes.

At the moment you can’t add lanes of your own, hopefully this will be possible Kanban becomes available Team Foundation Server were you can change the process model.

There is also a cumulative flow graph.

A great start Microsoft!

This will probably be included in a later service release of Team Foundation Server 2012.