Announcing Beta 1 of the TFS Administration Tool!

Outside of just the MSDN Forums, I also have had the opportunity to work as the Program Manager on the Aftermarket Solutions / Power Toys team here in Visual Studio.  Today we just released our first three Power Toys, including the Power Toy I acted as the Program Manager for, the TFS Administration Tool (Beta 1).  The following post was cross posted in the DDCPX Team Blog:

Fast on the heels of the MSBee CTP, I'm pleased to announce the availability of the TFS Administration Tool Beta 1.

For anybody who has used any of the betas or CTPs of Team Foundation Server, you are probably aware of the pain around user administration.  Simply put, a TFS administrator must add users (and their appropriate permissions roles) in TFS, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services servers separately to completely setup their TFS installation.  This process is time-consuming at best and downright confusing at worst.

I originally blogged about whether or not a tool to solve this pain point was worth pursuing a couple of months ago.  From the feedback we received on that blog post, and the MSDN Product Feedback Center suggestion filed for such a tool, we decided to create the tool as a Visual Studio Power Toy.

Please check out the GotDotNet CodeGallery site for the TFS Tool, which includes a download link and a place where you can file bugs that you find in the tool with us here at Microsoft.  (This tool should be posted by 5:00 PM PST today, 2/10/2006.)  After the final release of this tool, which we are planning to coincide with the final release of TFS, we will release the source code for this tool as a Microsoft Shared Source solution.

If you have any questions about the tool, please leave a comment in this blog or check out our Aftermarket Solutions Forum on the MSDN Forums.  A big cheer should go out to Kannan Sundararajan, the lead developer on this tool...great work!