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RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

There is already a lot of discussion on Scott’s recent blog entry on Tracking Bugs about whether Team System will provide an RSS feed for bugs.

Today, our internal tool doesn’t provide an RSS feed, but as one of the other Microsofties added in a comment to Scott’s blog there are a whole host of internal tools which have evolved around product studio to perform a similar function. Some of them send you email when a query result or a bug changes; others sit on your desktop and pop up alerts when new bugs come your way. I haven’t seen an RSS feed internally yet, but I suspect someone is probably working on it.

What would you like to see? RSS feeds? E-mail notifications? Messenger alerts? I’m not making any promises about what you’ll see in the final product but I’d love to hear what people outside of Microsoft would like to see. (Chances are that if you’re reading this blog you’ll want an RSS feed).

Also, what is the most important thing to track – changes to arbitrary query results, or changes to specific bugs?

Published Wednesday, November 03, 2004 11:23 PM by johnlawr
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Comments

Wednesday, November 03, 2004 5:51 PM by Andres Aguiar

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I vote for RSS feeds over user defined queries (one user could any number of them).
Wednesday, November 03, 2004 9:04 PM by Jon Box

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I'm for the mechanisms that can serve as a basis for giving us a variety of options including RSS, SMTP, database INSERT, etc.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004 9:18 PM by Mickey Gousset

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I agree with Jon in that I would like to have a variety of options, but if I had to choose priorities, I would set RSS as the top priority, followed by e-mail notification.

Personally, for me, I think RSS ability would foster the use of aggregators in my company, which could then possibly open up more opportunities.

I would love the ability to subscribe to specific bugs, so that I would be updated whenever they were updated.
Thursday, November 04, 2004 2:23 AM by Tony

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I know its the most work, but why don't you let the user decide? Thats what I like about Windows UI. With a good application you can use the keyboard, the mouse, menu, buttons, etc. It's the user that decides what matches his workflow.

So give the user the choice. Some prever RSS, some Email, and some IM.
Thursday, November 04, 2004 6:32 AM by Greg

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Another vote for Jon's idea.

A plug-in'able Interface... With RSS and Email shipped with the product.

As for thing to track, changes to bugs, with filtering.

I'm thinking some feeds like:

"My Bugs" (any change to any bug assigned or submitted by me. Kind of like My Tasks on WSS)

"New Bugs"

"Changes to Bugs For Field YYYY with value XXXX" (A somewhat arbitrary query. For example I want notification/feeds for where Application Title = "UberApp" or where Bug # = 100)
Thursday, November 04, 2004 12:35 PM by Rob Caron's Blog

# New Team System Stuff - 2004-11-04

Thursday, November 04, 2004 11:23 AM by ebbe

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Rule based email is obviously number one and a must have.

Create a pri 1 send mail to these folks, resolve a db issue send mail to these folks, assigned to me send mail to me, etc.

Must be able to get notified on any device and be able to immediately respond via email.

Any other notification methods would be gravy.
Friday, November 05, 2004 12:42 PM by Philip Rieck

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I'd say that Jon is dead-on : the only truly universally useful option is to allow the us to write what we need. This is a tool for software development, after all.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you ship with an easy notification interface, but no email capabilities, there will be 20 email notifier projects out there in a matter of weeks.

However, if you ship only email, it'll be nearly forever before any other "add-in" notifier is developed.

So my vote:
1) must have: easy managed interface for notifications (polling or eventing, whatever) I believe that you MUST be able to do arbitrary queries easily as well. Managed is also a must. (but COM/native is better than nothing! we could build the managed wrapper.)

2) must have: email notifier (preferably for ad-hoc queries). Sure, with #1 we could do it, but a canonical implementation is needed for this.

3) nice: make the desktop notifier available on gdn. and an rss notifier if available. the more examples the better.
Friday, November 05, 2004 9:08 PM by Korby Parnell's WebLog

# RSS Notifications and Email Alerts in Visual Studio Team System?

Friday, November 05, 2004 9:23 PM by the guru

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Priority 1: E-mail <br>Priority 2: Desktop alerts <br>
Saturday, November 06, 2004 3:00 AM by James Snape

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

If I had $100 to spend on the features: <br> <br>e-mail $50 <br>rss $10 <br>messenger $10 <br>query tracking $20 <br>bug tracking $10 <br> <br>Regards,
Saturday, November 06, 2004 7:06 AM by Krishna

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I vote for easy extensible interface / subscriber model with RSS and Email support built-in.
Saturday, November 06, 2004 7:23 AM by Jeff Lewis

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

+1 Rss
Saturday, November 06, 2004 8:15 AM by Steve Dunn

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

It would be nice to have a defined interface where we can put our own disseminator for the events. RSS/XML and e-mail would get my vote to be implemented first.
Saturday, November 06, 2004 12:36 PM by Chris Burrows

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Definately needs to support the following
1. Has to be extendable
2. Rules based.

This then means if you don't ship a provider/add-in that somebody wants they can go and create their own.
Saturday, November 06, 2004 2:28 PM by Esteban Garcia

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

RSS please
Sunday, November 07, 2004 12:58 PM by Enigma

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Add another vote for RSS ....
Sunday, November 07, 2004 3:26 PM by Peter Jones

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I vote for some sort of Provider model. Sometime you want to know ASAP, like when a nightly build fails. An email is ok for this but an SMS message on my cell phone and a messenger alert would be better. Other less important things can be emailed or RSS'ed. RSS means I wouldn't need to subscribe interested parties - they could do it themselves.

Also, we block Messenger internally and I suspect other companies may also do this, so alerts aren't much use.
Sunday, November 07, 2004 7:59 PM by Scott Lee

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I definately agree it needs to be extensible. There should also be multiple notification options.

I would personally prefer an RSS feed, but I know other teammates would still prefer email.
Monday, November 08, 2004 7:09 AM by Jeff Parker

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

RSS Feeds I am all for it.
Monday, November 08, 2004 8:38 AM by Saeid

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Only RSS
Thursday, November 11, 2004 12:10 AM by Paul Jackson

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

rss++;
Friday, November 12, 2004 10:56 AM by MikeWo

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I would like to see RSS feeds for sure. Then, as Chris Burrows recommended, a way to extend the events to plug in custom ones would be REALLY nice.
Saturday, November 13, 2004 5:41 PM by David Yack

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

rss and e-mail out of the box - ability to plug in via provider model custom ones that make sense in each shop
Monday, November 15, 2004 11:09 AM by Dwayne A. Davis

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

I agree with Philip Rieck (and therefore with John Box as well). An extensible means of notification is the way to go - preferrably with an email notification system built in that uses this interface. RSS feeds, Messenger posts, etc, can all fall out of this interface afterwords.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 1:49 AM by Martin Woodward

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

+1 for RSS and Email and MSN. Flexible publisher model (smiliar to CruiseControl.NET) would be great - along with a messenger based example?

On a different point to notifications, if the product had integration with nAnt and an out the box Agile process template that would also be great.

While you are at it, can I have the moon on a stick ;-)
Monday, November 29, 2004 10:42 PM by Scott Dockendorf

# re: RSS or email notifications for Work Item tracking?

Ditto Martin's Comments. +1 for RSS and email & MSN.
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