When we started designing the project management features in VS Team System, we had a pretty idealized view of the world. Project managers would sit in their cubicles and grind away in MS Project. The resulting tasks would funnel into VS Team System to be handed around to all the rest of the team. We got pretty far along on that model.
We knew that internal to MS, lots of people built spreadsheets to track stuff. But we just chalked that up to the, how would one say, “loose” way that MS engineers sometimes manage projects. Surely, IT shops would all be using Project?
Then we went to visit customers. We were delighted and surprised to see that everyone else uses Excel as much as we do. So, back to the drawing board, a few more late nights with bad pizza (ok, a lot of late nights), and, voila, Team System integrates with Excel. I think this is going to be a feature that gets a lot of use in the real world for things like:
1. Light-weight project management - I don't have MS Project. I don't want to learn all that stuff. I just want to write out my list of tasks and track them quickly. For the impromptu project manager, Excel will be a great way to pull together work items quickly. And you're more likely to have Excel on your desktop than Project.
2. Custom views of the project - you can build a query against the VSTS work item database and attach it to an Excel spreadsheet. Then, whenever you sync the spreadsheet to the underlying database, you get a current view on only the stuff you care about. It may be a set of tasks or requirements; it may be a special organization of the tasks that matters to you (organize tasks by component or by use case or by team); it may be a custom project management model you're using (like a SCRUM sprint). All these and a lot more are possible. And they all sync back to the one true database, so they're always current and up-to-date.
3. Bulk editing - you need to grab all the tasks assigned to “Bob” and reassign them to “Mary”? With the Excel integration, you can dump the tasks in a spreadsheet, click the mouse once or twice and drop them back into the database.
4. Reporting - VSTS will have rich reporting through our data warehouse tied to SQL Server (more on that another day). But, you might not want to learn how to do all that, and you already draw cool graphs in Excel. Pull over the work items you're interested in and go nuts!
Excel integration will bring a lot of flexibility to VSTS project management. We'll be bundling in some sample spreadsheets, but we expect to see a lot more good ones out there as people explore what this can do.
Which do you use more, Project or Excel?
