Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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We made one significant licensing change for TFS with the release of TFS 2008. We've gotten a lot of feedback over the past 2 years that there are classes of users who make very light use of TFS and for those users a $500 CAL (list price) is just too much. Most of these scenarios involve some kind of very infrequent access to work item tracking. We've decided to tackle one of the scenarios with licensing changes in 2008.
The new licensing provisions are designed to make it easy if you want to allow lots of people in your company to use TFS to file bugs, feature requests, etc and have them available for your development team. Specifically they allow an unlimited number of users in your company to create any work item, query for work items they have created and view or update any work item they have created all without a CAL. This right comes with your Team Foundation Server Standard Edition server license and requires no additional purchase.
Please keep in mind that this is focused narrowly at this scenario. If this works well, customers like it, people understand the restrictions and use it properly, I expect we'll look at trying to simplify licensing around other similar scenarios in future versions of TFS.
The bad news part of this is that we really don't have any UI that restricts users to exactly this scenario right now so it's hard to know you are in compliance. We have committed to producing software changes within the next year that would allow organizations to feel comfortable that their users are in compliance. We've talked about permission changes and UI changes. My favorite option (which we are pursuing) is to add a new page to Team System Web Access that focuses precisely on this scenario and enable permissioning the site appropriately so that organizations can point their broad user base at that page and feel comfortable that users are staying within their license rights. For now, you may consider building your own custom web page for doing something similar or you may just try to explain to your users what they are and are not allowed to do.
I hope this change addresses a concern that many of you have expressed to me. Please read the updated End User License Agreement that comes with Team Foundation Server 2008 for an official statement of the licensing terms. If you have questions or comments on this licensing change or others you would like to see, please let me know.
Brian
This sounds like a big step in the right direction.
I have a few concerns though - first and foremost, you specifically mention Standard Edition which makes it sound like this option is NOT available to Workgroup Edition users. Which would be me. My understanding was that the very existence of Workgroup Edition was for small development teams who would find the cost of Standard Edition plus CALs prohibitive; doesn't it seem likely that those people would be especially likely to have people who could benefit from this feature?
(This actually relates to my biggest gripe about Workgroup Edition in the first place. My company has five developers today. If we hire a sixth, we suddenly need to go from the Workgroup Edition that comes with MSDN, to buying a full Standard Edition plus six CALs. That's a pretty huge price differential between the five-user case and the six-user case. There really needs to be a way to soften that blow a bit - for example by allowing the 5-user limit on W.E. to be increased, but charging more per user to do this than a S.E. CAL would cost, so that there's a point at which it becomes more expensive than getting S.E. plus CALs)
Another concern is the "work items that they created" aspect. When doing development work for a particular customer, I'd like the option to let them see ALL outstanding issues on their particular project, even issues we create ourselves. It also means that if you want to mark an issue they report as a duplicate of an existing known bug, they have no ability to see the status of the issue it was a duplicate of.
How is "unlimited number of users in your company" to be understood? Do they need to have a fixed employment contract? What about freelancers that are close to a company? Also, in principle, this still prohibits something like connect.microsoft.com, where customers of a company are connected up to the bug system, right?
We have found one licensing change for TFS2008 to date: No CAL is needed to access work item tracking
Another question. What about using the Team Explorer 2008 for working with Work Items. Is this legal?
Will Microsoft Gold Partner's with Custom Development competency receive a standard Team Foundation Server 2008 license as they did with Team Foundation Server 2005?
If so will this be accessible via MSDN downloads or will it only arrive via CD as this seems to be the case with TFS Server 2005.
Thanks!
Sorry, please ignore previous comment/question, just read you're earlier post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/23/tfs-licensing-change-for-tfs-2008.aspx
Answered all my questions.
Just seen a post on Brian Harry's blog that the license has been changed for TFS. You no longer need
As long as any user related extra pages go straight into Sharepoint 2007 where the rest of the TFS Web Access belongs...
As I was writing the post I knew someone was going to ask the question about Workgroup Edition. I wrote "Standard Edition" because I know we put it in there. I can't remember if we put it in Workgroup Edition or not. I'll find out but with everyone out for the holidays I can't do it right now.
I agree the cliff of workgroup from 5 to 6 is unfortunate. We've toyed with a few ideas to try to address this but haven't found a good way yet. Question - do all of your 5 developers have Team System client SKUs or do some of them have Pro?
We debated for 6 months exactly what the limitation should be for the "free unlimited use scenario". The problem is that a lot of the power of TFS is in work item tracking. If we let you query, view and edit any work items then you are using a huge portion of the value of TFS. The problem is we intend for people closely associated with the development team to buy a CAL. Free work item tracking would eliminate the need for many people to buy CALs. We settled on the "file a bug" scenario because it was very hard to argue that application end users who occasionally file bugs are really getting a ton of value from TFS individually - although the overall organization is benefiting. As I said, depending on how this goes, we may look at broadening the covered scenarios. One of the customers on our advisory council has made an impassioned plea that we broaden it to cover acceptance testing - which requires viewing things (like requirements, etc) that the user didn't enter themselves. We'll see.
Yes, the "unlimited users within your company" applies to employees, contractors and vendors. No, this license doesn't provide for something like connect.microsoft.com. We have a separate license for that (and have had it for 2 years) called the "external connector license". It allows you to pay a fixed price to publish public access to your TFS for non-employies, contractors and vendors.
The partner programs (as far as I know - and I'm pretty sure) did not change. So, if you got TFS 2005, you will get TFS 2008. You will recieve it by mail in the January partner mailing.
We're working on integrating Team System Web Access into Sharepoint. All of the TSWA controls will be Sharepoint web parts and can be wired together in customized experiences. However, that's not likely to happen in the timeframe I mentioned above. We'll see though.
Jeff Beehler tracked down the EULA wording for me. Here it is:
3. ADDITIONAL LICENSING REQUIREMENTS AND/OR USE RIGHTS.
a. Client Access Licenses (CALs) - (Standard Edition Only).
i. You must acquire and assign the appropriate CAL to each device or user that accesses your instances of the server software directly or indirectly. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
* You do not need CALs for any of your servers licensed to run instances of the server software.
* You do not need CALs for up to two devices or users to access your instances of the server software only to administer those instances.
* You do not need a CAL to access work item tracking functionality to create new work items, or view and update work items you opened.
* Your CALs permit access to your instances of earlier versions, but not later versions, of the server software.
As you can see, the new "bug filing" clause only applies to Standard Edition. I don't remember discussing this particular issue but seeing as we debated this and so many other options for 6-9 months, we probably did and it's just leaked out of my mind. If I were to try to retroactively create the arguement, I suspect it would go something like - Workgroup Edition is already a terrificly good deal. It's basically "free" if you buy MSDN + VSTS client SKU. This new licensing clause adds substantial value and it makes sense to "bolster" the value in Standard Edition with it.
Technilogically speaking, it would have been difficult for us to enable this in Workgroup Edition due to the way we enforce the 5 user limit. There is a special group that identifies the 5 users. If anyone else tries to access the server, their request is rejected. Enabling the unlimited "file a bug" user would have meant removing this 5 user limit or adding new restrictions that clearly carve out exactly what these "file a bug" users are allowed to do. At the API level, that turns out to be very hard to do - which is why we are pursuing the custom web page approach.
I know some of you aren't going to like this answer and I'm sorry about that.
This is the best news that I have heard in a while. Using Team Foundation Server to manage bugs has not
I have been reading this thread with a combination of interest and confusion.
When my organisation purchased Team System in late 2005 it was on the express understanding that use of TFS without a CAL was permitted for UAT purposes. See link to content of original Team System 2005 Licensing White Paper;
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:98FVtsAKW4QJ:mail.ezead.com:7080/users/toolman/Ezead%2520Community/Visual%2520Studio/VisualStudio2005Team.doc+%22non-licensed+users+may+access+the+operating+system+and+server+software+solely+for+the+purpose+of+user+acceptance+testing%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=uk
An updated document now appears on the Microsoft site see link; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1FA86E00-F0A3-4290-9DA9-6E0378A3A3C5&displaylang=en
The provision for the use of Team System without a CAL for UAT purposes is now missing.
It now appears that my organisation needs to upgrade to v2008 if we wish to use the product for UAT purposes.
Some clarity would be appreciated!
To check my understanding...
You do not need a CAL to submit a bug or feature request. However, because you are limited to only viewing items you submitted, you cannot search to see if the bug or feature has already been submitted by someone else. Is this correct?
This just about guarantees duplicate/overlapping entries. Multiple entries mean that progress/feedback on a submitted bug or feature will be unlikely to go to every overlapping entry.
In short, non-team members can throw a request into a black hole with little chance of the item ever being updated to provide feedback to the submitter. Additionally, team members get an increase in overlapping entries to sort through. Did I miss anything?
I do not mean to sound negative but I do not really think you have addressed the problem.
By the way, given that the subscription rate _DOUBLED_ when TS came out, I would hardly call the workgroup edition "free"
David, you are correct. We talked about the scenario of searching for duplicates and ultimately decided to exclude it for now because it complicates the message. If you can search for and view any work item, then you have a hard time deliniating what work item tracking functionality you can't do and we weren't ready to include all work item tracking functionality for free.
In the future we may enable this - for example, maybe we enable only full text searching but no other kinds of queries. That would probably be restrictive enough to prevent it from being equivalent to all work item tracking functionality but still enable the scenario.
I think you understand it and yes, we recognize that downside.
I'm not sure what you mean about the price doubling. The price was exactly the same as MSDN Universal except you also got a VSTS Role SKU. So it was actually more value for the same money. You are right that it's about double if you upgraded to Suite. However, you are right that it isn't "free". That's not a very precise word. It's "included in your MSDN Premium + VSTS SKU purchase". "Free" is just less typing :)