Team Project Customization Overview

After much anticipation and excitement, you’ve just successfully created your first team project.  You’ve played with it enough to get a taste of all the cool, new features, but how do you go about customizing it to better meet your team’s needs?  For example, the Contributor group created by MSF Agile isn’t meeting your needs – you really need more role-specific groups like Developer and Tester.  Or the check-in policies are handy, but you’d like to provide one of your own as well.

I’m Amy Hagstrom, a Visual Studio Team Foundation Program Manager, and I’m posting to provide you an overview of team project customization.

Elements that can be customized for your team project:

1.      Groups & Permissions:  Create new groups, or update existing ones.  Add/remove users to a group or grant/revoke permissions for a group.

2.      Work Item Types & Queries:  Create WI (Work Item) types, add or modify WI fields (for example, Priority should allow values of 1 through 10 instead of just 1, 2, and 3), or change which MS Project column a certain field is mapped to.  You can also create your own public or private queries.  There will be a post to this blog in a couple weeks that will go into detail about work item type customization.

3.      Version Control Check-In Notes and Policies: Add or remove check-in note fields, or make some fields required and others not. Add/update/delete check-in policies.  There will be a post to this blog in a few weeks that will go more in depth about what can be done with policies and how to create them.

4.      Classifications: Update your team project’s structure by hierarchically breaking out its features/components or iterations.  By doing so, team members will then be able to file work items, test cases, and so forth under those hierarchies.

5.      Portal: Modify the look and feel of the portal or its contents, like the document templates your team should be using.

6.      Process Guidance: Edit the process guidance to customize what processes your team should follow.  Randy Miller should be posting later more in detail on how this can be done.

7.      SQL Reports: As Allen Clark mentioned in an earlier post, you can create your own custom reports using Business Intelligence Development Studio, the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services designer, or extracting the reports and editing their xml manually.

8.      Build Types:  As Khushboo Sharan discussed last week, each team project can have its own build types.

After you create a Team Project there is a lot of fine tuning you can do to get it working best for your team.  Next week I’ll post about using and customizing process templates.  Process templates are a type of blueprint for the New Team Project Wizard, and they can be used to set up many of these customizations.  Process templates will save you time in setting up the team project and promote predictability and consistency by having a common set of tools, content, and processes for projects to follow.

As always, your feedback is appreciated and welcome.  What is your team going to want to customize?

Amy Hagstrom

Program Manager

Visual Studio Team Foundation