This is the first chapter in the series on Reporting in Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010. In this series, I’ll cover the following topics:

  • Walkthroughs for out-of-the-box experience including customizations
  • Custom report authoring tools and walkthroughs
  • An overview of the reporting architecture

Out-of-the-box, we have several ways to report on the data in TFS to analyze and track project progress, quality and various other metrics:

  • SharePoint Dashboards
    • We have a brand new set of dashboards based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)/SharePoint Server as well as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)/SharePoint Foundation.
      image  If you choose to integrate TFS with SharePoint Server deployment, then we enable a complete set of rich dashboards using Excel Reports that “light up” with Excel Services and Team Web Access web parts. Since the reports are based on Excel, they are very easy to customize.
      image  If you don’t have SharePoint Server in your deployment or you choose to integrate TFS with WSS/SharePoint Foundation then you still get a set of dashboards with reports and Team Web Access web parts. The reports on these dashboards are SQL Server Reporting Services reports written in Report Definition Language (RDL), so they are not as easy to customize as the Excel reports. The Excel Reports are still available on the SharePoint site, but you don’t get the light up experience since Excel Services isn’t available.

  • Rich SQL Reporting Services (SSRS/RS) Reports
      image We have a whole set of new and improved RS reports, about 16 RDL reports in the MSF for Agile 5.0 template and 15 RDL reports in the MSF for CMMI 5.0 template, providing visibility into bugs, builds, tests etc.


  • Excel Reports from Work Item Queries
      image This is one of the features that lower the barrier to entry in building your own reports that I like to highlight; the ability to generate a report in Excel based on a work item query.

I’ll cover each of these topics with detailed walkthroughs in the next few chapters. If you have questions or feedback please leave me a comment or send me an email at sunder.raman at microsoft.com