In my previous posts around TFS and Windows SharePoint Services I explained how you could use WSS3.0 or WSS2.0 with TFS. In many companies you already have a corporate SharePoint Farm. You may want to use that with TFS so you don't have to maintain 2 different sets of portals. This post tries to explain how you could achieve this.

TFS requires

• SQL Reporting services to be present on TFS AT machine
• WSS can be installed on any machine on the network.

Relationship:

There is a circular relationship between TFS, WSS and Reporting. What do I mean?

• TFS uses WSS as the Team Portal. All the documents and process guidance is hosted within WSS.
• When users access their team portal they also want to have access to their reports on the portal so we have links to the reports on the portal. This requires us to know the reporting server URL to redirect the requests made by users.
• TFS also needs to keep track of Reporting and SharePoint URLs for various tasks.

In short:

• TFS needs to know where WSS and Reporting are located
• WSS needs to know where Reporting server is located for a TFS Instance.

Sharing same SharePoint Farm for multiple TFS Instances:

To achieve this we require every TFS instance to have its own Managed path. You can create managed paths using the WSS admin site. As shown in the diagram below TFS_001 TFS Instance should have its unique managed path for e.g. TFS001. Similarly for TFS_002 you should have TFS002.

Following are steps you can use to setup this environment

• Create a managed path for your TFS Instance using WSS admin site.
• Once the managed path is created you can install TFS. In TFS setup for WSS information provide
  • The root site URL which is the URL for your managed path e.g. http://<sharpointservername>/TFS001
  • Admin site URL for the farm at time
• You have to install WSS_Ext SKU on SharePoint Farm Machine.
  • At end of setup you will see following UI. Here you can map you SharePoint Site to linked Reporting Site
    • SharePoint site for TFS_001 would be http://<sharepointserver>/TFS001
    • Reporting Services reports site would be http://<tfsserver>/reports
    • Reporting Services administrative site would be http://<tfsserver>/reportsserver

Note: You can run this tool again for 2^nd TFS server by running <TFSInstallDirectory>\tools\TFSWSSConfig

Note: This post is relevant only to Dual server configurations of TFS.

Many customers have asked me if TFS Setup account needs to be Administrator on TFS Data Tier. For Orcas the answer is "NO". Let me provide some details on this topic.

In VS 2005 we had a DT SKU that was installed on DT machine. Therefore you had to be administrator to install the DT SKU. Based on tons of feedback we got from our customers we removed that SKU in Orcas and now you just have 1 SKU or installer for both single server and dual server setup. The advantage is you do not need to be administrator to install TFS in dual server environment. You still need to be a SQL Administrator so we can create TFS databases.

Following are tasks we perform as TFS Setup on the Data Tier machine.

1. In System Health Check we try to connection to DT machine and check if all the services are up and running. This will fail if you are not administrator on DT and will generate few warnings for you. You can ignore the warnings.
   1. Just make sure the TFS Setup account has permission to create Databases on the SQL instance you are using.
2. We create TFS Databases and provide access to TFS Service account to these databases. This should be successful even if you are not Admin on DT machine.

Hope this provides some more understanding around TFS Setup account.