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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In TFS 2010, we made integration of TFS with Sharepoint and SQL Reporting Services optional. You can choose not to install them, you can choose not to create sites even if they are installed, etc. As part of this, you can also configure your TFS server to point at centralized Sharepoint and reporting infrastructure, etc. Basically, we've made it really flexible.
It's all well and good until you create your project, decide you don't need/want Sharepoint and then come back later and decide you made a mistake. How do you get your Sharepoint and Reporting sites. We knew this was going to be an issue, but unfortunately, we didn't have time to make it a seamless experince. In the TFS 2010 RC release, we have, at least, made it possible (if difficult). Once we get the product shipped, we plan to add a Power Tool capability that will make the experience nice rather than making you edit XML files. Fortunately, it will be a relatively small minority of customers who will ever need to go down this path.
Gregg has written a post showing how you can do this on the RC today if you really need to: http://blogs.msdn.com/greggboer/archive/2010/02/24/creating-sharepoint-portals-reports-and-upgrading-reports-for-an-existing-team-project.aspx
Brian
This is a dealbreaker. We tried TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 and sharepoint setup was the main reason why we didn't move over to TFS. Setup is improved in TFS2010, but having these sharepoint issues release after release isn't a good thing. A good rule of thumb is that if there's a bug in setup, it's a showstopper.
I'm confused by your comment. What's a deal breaker? You can install Sharepoint or not. There's no setup bug described here. If you change your mind after you've set everything up we'll make it possible but that additional feature didn't make this release and we'll provide an out of band solution for it.
Brian, out of curiosity, does the TFS SharePoint integration work with WSS or just MOSS? Right now we're running WSS (using the integrated database - sorry, not ready to add SP and SQL CALs to the mix just yet!) and I'm wondering if any of this integration spills over to those freeloaders of us who are using WSS with an integrated database.
Thanks.
Yes, it works with just WSS. The dashboard experience isn't quite as good as with MOSS but it's still pretty nice.
I'm glad you mentioned this - I assumed with all the improvements to setup, configuring SP and RS would be easy after the fact. I guess I'll just install them up front and then ignore them until we need them!
If you need reporting and installing SSRS becomes too big of an issue, please take a look at Windward Arrow (see www.windwardreports.com/arrow.htm ). It is a lot easier to use, is more powerful, and is easy to install.
thanks - dave