Deprecation of the Team Rooms in Team Services and TFS

Ewald Hofman (MSFT)

Modern development teams heavily depend on collaboration. People want (and need) a place to monitor activity (notifications) and talk about it (chat). A few years back, we recognized this trend and set out to build the Team Room to support these scenarios. Since that time, we have seen more solutions to collaborate emerge in the market. Most notably, the rise of Slack. And more recently, the announcement of Microsoft Teams.

With so many good solutions available that integrate well with TFS and Team Services, we have made a decision to deprecate our Team Room feature from both TFS and Team Services.

Timeline for Deprecation

Please find below the timeline for deprecation of the Team Rooms functionality in both TFS and Team Services.

deprecation-message

Team Services

If you are working in Team Services, you will see a new yellow banner appear in early January that communicates our plan. In September 2017, we will turn off the Team Room feature completely, and you won’t have access to your chats anymore.

TFS

If you are using TFS installed on-premises, the announcement banner will appear when you install TFS 2017 Update 1. Rest assured that Team Rooms will continue to work in TFS 2017, and throughout all TFS 2017 Updates. Team Rooms will be removed from TFS 2018.

Alternatives

The Team room is used both for a notification hub as well as for chat. TFS and Team Services already integrate with many other collaboration products including Microsoft Teams, Slack, HipChat, Campfire and Flowdock. You can also use Zapier to create your own integrations, or get very granular control over the notifications that show up. Which one is the best solution for you is mostly dependent if one of these tools are already in use in your organization, and personal preference.

Another alternative is to install the Activity Feed by Dave Smits. It allows you to add a widget to the team’s dashboard to show the activity in the product.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment on this blog post or send email to teamroom_feedback@microsoft.com.

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