Office Integration

re: Office Integration

DotWind — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:18:00 GMT

I am not sure if this feature is already covered, but it would be nice to have a kind of mail merge between outlook and excel. Where say one can have a list of emails with names and some maybe other data in excel and then just craft an email in outlook that will use that list to create each email and have special fields to reference the data and send each of them individually.

Hatim

re: Office Integration

Bruce — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 09:44:00 GMT

How about integration with Outlook tasks and calendar?

re: Office Integration

Jason S — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:48:00 GMT

Hi,

The integration with Project is nice, but what about Project Server? Is anything planned? Feel free to point me to a URL instead of giving a lengthy response. :-)

More info: I work for a consulting company. We have a lot of projects on the go at any one time (think dozens). We use Project Server as the central work item repository for all projects. Some level of integration between VSTS and Project Server would be sweet. We're very interested in VSTS but we don't want to have to extend VSTS to support Project Server unless we have to. Thanks!

Jason

re: Office Integration

Siddharth Bhatia — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 03:58:00 GMT

Hatim,

We don't have a mail merge feature planned in version 1 of the product.
It should be possible to build such a tool using the Excel and Outlook object models.

-Siddharth

re: Office Integration

Siddharth Bhatia — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 04:17:00 GMT

Bruce,

Great suggestion!
We don't have the feature in our V1 product. However, it is possible to use the Work Item Tracking Object Model and the Outlook object model and create an add-in that will integrate Outlook with the Team Foundation Work Item database.

Some pointers on Extensibility:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvsent/html/vsts-ext.asp
- http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2004/09/22/233122.aspx

A couple of questions for you:
What are the key Outlook integration scenarios that are interesting to you?
If you are a developer/tester as a part of team, are you more comfortable with updating the status of dev/test tasks through Outlook or through Visual Studio?

Thanks,
Siddharth

re: Office Integration

Siddharth Bhatia — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 05:51:00 GMT

Hi Jason,

I hear you loud and clear. The user model with Project Server for V1 is to use an .mpp file as the integration point between the two servers (Project Server and Team Foundation Server). There is no direct server-server integration in the V1 product. We are thinking about it for the future.

I'd love to find out more about how you're using Project Server and hear your thoughts on how you see VSTS-Project Server integration playing out. Feel free to drop me a line at: sbhatia@microsoft.com and I'll set something up.

Thanks,
-Siddharth

re: Office Integration

Bruce — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 20:22:00 GMT

Q: What are the key Outlook integration scenarios that are interesting to you?

A: I use Outlook to keep my task list today - so if my team adopted VSTS it would be great if the tasks there could show up on my Outlook task list, so I could organize them with respect to my other Outlook tasks, as well as schedule them appropriately. (BTW, I currently use a third-party tool called Taskline to integrate my Outlook tasks with my Outlook calendar.)

Q: If you are a developer/tester as a part of team, are you more comfortable with updating the status of dev/test tasks through Outlook or through Visual Studio?

A: Since I currently use Outlook to track my tasks, my first instinct was to say I'm more comfortable updating my task status there - however, on reflection, it would be cool if you finish a coding task in Visual Studio to immediately pull up the associated task item right there, and mark it completed. So I now lean toward the VS answer; but I'm not sure there is a single *right* answer to this question.

Collection of Excellent VSTS Posts

.NET Brain Droppings — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 23:32:00 GMT

.::Szőkelizer 128::.

RIO - Randektív Informatikai Oldal — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:50:00 GMT

<p><ul><li><a href="http://www.brustblog.com/PermaLink,guid,14fdb863-4733-4a0d-a690-4604437c380b.aspx">NS8.0 és az IE</a> </li><li><a href="http://statgep.hu/mra.sx">Készül a statgép</a&