Notion Tools for Team System

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The guys over at Notion Solutions released a set of tools that add some convenience to some typical Team System tasks.  I've worked with the tools, an they're pretty easy to configure.  I was talking with Chris Menegay, and he said that they just had common day-to-day tasks that they needed to accelerate.  You can watch a video to see more.

There are four components:

  1. A Timesheet tool that helps you report time against VSTS work items (usually tasks).  It helps with reporting and bulk time updates.
  2. A "Work Organizer" that is particularly useful for managing requirements and requirement artifacts.  The tools add in a work-item hierarchy that works with TFS 2008, and makes it easy to generate new requirement artifacts from a template (Word documents, Visio diagrams, etc.) which you attach to the work item.
  3. A "Work Planner" that's useful for release and iteration management.  It helps balance resources, plan which people and features will go into each release, and manage the relationships between them.
  4. A set of work item controls that make it easy to view and navigate work item relationships and hierarchies.

There are also reports that go with it.  Out of the box, it's easy to configure for the MSF Agile and CMMI templates, but I've also configured it to work with Scrum for Team System. 

While I'm mentioning Notion Solutions, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Mickey Gousset, who's done some nice work over at RadioTFS.