A little bit about myself and Web Access

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Some of you might already know that I'm the Program Manager on the Web Access team in Team Foundation Server product group.

In March 2007, Microsoft acquired the company I had founded with Ahmet Akkas back in 2001. Ahmet, Serkan (one of our senior developers) and I, along with our families, moved to beautiful North Carolina in June 2007 and started to work in Microsoft's Raleigh office.

The story starts in 2001, when my old time friend Ahmet Akkas and I had decided to start a software company in Izmir, Turkey. Our company was called devBiz.

Initially, it was just two of us. Our first product was devMail.Net, an email component to send an receive email messages. As the years passed, devBiz has grown, and we kept adding more components to our product line.

Early in 2004, we were in the early stages of prototyping our idea of a web based bug tracking application. When we heard about the upcoming Team Foundation Server, we thought that it would be a good opportunity to build a web interface to TFS, using it as a back-end store.

This is how "TeamPlain" was born - the tool that's known as "Team System Web Access" today.

We have released the first version of TeamPlain just after TFS was available in March 2005, and it was a great success. We had many happy customers and partners using TeamPlain. Many customers were looking for a web interface for TFS, and devBiz had the answer. We built relationships with the Microsoft VSTS team, and then became one of the few Visual Studio Industry Partners.

It was about mid 2006 when we started the partnership and acquisition discussions with Microsoft. Oh boy, the whole process was very challenging and a lot of fun. Everyone I had worked with was amazing in their personality, professionalism, friendliness and dedication to get this deal done.

I can't tell you the details, but everything went well and Microsoft has acquired our company in March 2007 and our team has been transferred to Microsoft's Raleigh office.

Today, the Web Access team consists of Adam Barr, Ahmet Akkas, Buck Hodges, Nick Kirchem, Peter Majernik, Serkan Inci and myself, all working hard to deliver you great features and value in Web Access.