Yesterday, Microsoft announced the new Visual Studio Team System.  This new offering will allow teams of developers, testers, architects and project managers to work together in designing and shipping great solutions.  There are new tools here for all those groups and a new system to allow all these people to communicate what needs to be and what they're doing.  You can get a good overview at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem.

My name is Keith Rowe and I'm the Product Unit Manager  focusing on the project management tools within VSTS.  I'll be talking about how our tools allow you to create new projects, move from requirements to scenarios to tasks in the project plan, distribute work items to all your team members, track their progress and build many rich reports.  I'll be showing how we integrate VSTS with Sharepoint, MS Project and Excel to make this easy and seamless.

Another major component of the VS Team System is our support for methodologies.  Out of the box, we will support two new flavors of the Microsoft Solution Framework - MSF Agile and MSF Formal.  These methodologies provide specific guidance on how to move projects through the lifecycle and, more importantly, they reconfigure the rest of the VSTS tools to encourage the team to follow the steps.  I'll be explaining all this in much more detail.

We've announced the product, but we're still a long way from shipping.  I hope to hear from everyone out there to understand how we can make these tools work for you.