Microsoft acquires TeamPlain
TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines. TeamPlain has been in the market for about a year now and has been very successful. Our advisory council and other customers have been telling us for the past year that we need a web UI for VSTS and that TeamPlain would be a great solution for us. We’ve listened, looked very closely at the product and concluded that acquiring TeamPlain is the right thing to do.
TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access. Effective today, TeamPlain will be available as a free download to users who own a Team Foundation Server. It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL. Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via their online forums. Over the next few months, we will be rebranding TeamPlain as a Microsoft product and running it through the CPX release process. When that is complete, we will be releasing it as a VSTS PowerTool, transitioning support to the Microsoft forums and beginning CSS support. In the Orcas timeframe, we will be releasing Team System Web Access as an official, documented, localized, officially supported component of Team Foundation Server. We will be working out these details over the next few months.
For more information, please see Brian Harry’s blog.
