There are a ton of features in Visual Studio Team System however as an ISV, which ones will typically have the greatest impact – positive that is :)

We’ve selected our top 3 areas of challenge and/or frustration observed when working with ISVs and which can be significantly alleviated through the use of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS).

From the top then!

1. Reliability and scale. We have all experienced a time when our source code was seemingly secure in our code repository but when we went to retrieve it, it wasn’t there! Or we have been working on a product, diligently logging our code in the repository only to find the system was corrupt and we have to redo our work!

TFS was built from the ground up to provide a secure, reliable and scalable source code repository, many of these benefits being derived through its use of SQL Server. Lots of partners have moved to TFS in order to benefit from its improved reliability but surprisingly there are still lots that haven’t.

If you are in any doubt as to TFS’ ability to scale and be reliable, check out the latest ‘dog food’ statistics of how we are using it internally to support a number of our key developer teams.
TFS adoption in Microsoft
Latest dogfood statistics
I also particularly like this Case Study regarding Thompson Reuters who, despite largely developing on non Microsoft platforms, still chose TFS for, amongst other things, it’s Source Code repository!

2. Multiple versions for multiple customers. Most ISVs in our experience support at least 2 or 3 different major versions of their key products. However within these often lie countless different minor versions for different customer’s specific requirements. So how do you support multiple versions? Can you rebuild a customer’s specific version? What happens if you find a bug: Can you identify which versions (and therefore customers) will be affected? Do you know what the impact will be? How quickly and easily can you get the bug fix out the relevant customers?

Team System has a feature called branching which helps address this challenge. For more information check out :-
What is Branching
Branching 101
Branching and Merging: Which approach is right
TFS Branching Guide

3. Managing Projects. Project Managers want to manage projects, yes? Yet time and time we see Project Managers’ spending much of their time gathering data from their team of developers. Now I’m sure they love spending time talking to their developers about how things are going but wouldn’t they be better spending their time managing the project: Are we going to release on time? Can we deliver all the features the customer wants? Am I confident the next release will be stable with a minimum of bugs? Etc

Team System enables you to seamlessly gather project data from your team without the hassle (or the ‘chats’J). Trend, burndown, velocity, remaining work, defect trending report – Just some of the TFS reports to help you know the project is on track and of course the data integrating nicely with Project.

For more information take a look at these links :-
VSTS for Project Managers
I’m a Project Manager – what can VSTS do for me?
Project Management comes to Visual Studio
Project Server VSTS Connector

For more information on the wider benefits of TFS click here

To purchase TFS please contact your Reseller and if you’re a Gold or Certified Partner please quote your Partner ID to find out what offers you are eligible for.