Office Integration
Hi everyone!
I’m Siddharth Bhatia and I’m the Program Manager for the Office Integration features in the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). I’m convinced that the Office Integration features are among the coolest in Team System!
What is Office Integration?
We’ve built a set of add-ins for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project that enable users to read and write work items to and from the Team Foundation Server work item database. We’re looking to have users wield the power to the tools they know and love to manipulate work item data.
Integration with Microsoft Excel
Excel is an amazing tool for creating and managing lists, for sorting and sifting through data and for creating reports and charts. We built a Team System list object through which users can obtain work items from the database, arrange them in the view they prefer and publish new or edited work items back to the database.
An Excel list object:
Here are some of the use scenarios we’re thinking of:
- Bulk Entry: A business analyst is crafting the set of scenarios for a particular iteration. He cuts and pastes some scenarios from other documents into Excel, creates a few new ones, attaches a rank to indicate their relative importance and then publishes that set to the team.
- Bulk Edit: A test manager pulls in a set of bugs into Excel, sorts the bugs by priority and bulk postpones all the lower priority bugs to the next milestone.
- Triage: A committee meets on a daily basis and pulls up a worksheet through which they can extract all the new code defects opened that day. The committee reviews each bug routes them to the appropriate owner and publishes the updated bugs back to the database.
- Charting: A project manager runs a query to obtain the latest status on the set of tasks that have to be completed by the end of the iteration and creates a few specific charts. She also creates a pivot table and binds it directly to a cube in the Team Foundation data warehouse to extract detailed metrics*. She then sends the charts and metrics out to the team to report on the overall progress.
- Offline: A project manager returns from a vacation and wants to catch up on the state of the project. He runs a query in Visual Studio and exports all of the new bugs that were opened since the start of his vacation into Excel. He prints the worksheet out for easy reading back at home.
*Look for an upcoming blog entry from my colleague, Allen Clark, who will talk about the cool Reporting features of Team System.
Integration with Microsoft Project
Project is simply the premier tool for project management. When it comes to managing software development project, what we want to see is the project manager spending more time managing project issues and less time tediously obtaining project status.
Some of the key scenarios:
· Task breakdown: The project manager brings in the set of scenarios created by the business analyst and decomposes them down into components and then into tasks for the development team. After publishing those tasks to the team, the project manager now has a “live” project plan.
· Schedule management: As the developers complete and update the tasks, the project manager simply needs to refresh the project plan to see if the project is on schedule.
Getting Started
In Microsoft Excel, all you need to do it click on “New List” from the toolbar:
And in Microsoft Project, simply click “Choose Team Project” and away you go:
Or from Visual Studio, you can run a query and then export that into Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project:
Feedback
It’s almost always the case that we can’t think of all the usage scenarios. I’d love to get some feedback on what you think of these scenarios and what other ways you use or want to be able to use the Office integration features. Do write in with your thoughts!
