Microsoft discontinuing Project Server/TFS Integration. Partner to provide solution

Gregg Boer

As Agile practices continue to evolve and become our customer’s primary choice for work management, we are changing how TFS and Project Server integrate. With the next major version of TFS, TFS ’15’, we will no longer provide an out-of-box integration experience between Project Server and Team Foundation Server. Nor will we be providing an out-of-box integration for Project Online and Visual Studio Team Services.

We will continue to support our existing integration solution, which supports the following versions

• TFS 2010 SP1, 2012, 2013, and 2015
• Project Server 2007, 2010 and 2013

Going forward, we are turning to a partner that provides an integration solution for both Project Server/TFS and Project Online/Team Services.

Why the change?

When we first introduced our Project Server/TFS integration several years ago, Agile was not as prominent as it is today. Many projects in TFS were being run as traditional projects. As Agile became dominant, most TFS projects are being run as Agile projects. We found that our integration was not meeting customer’s expectations.

We followed up with several customers who were using the Project Server/TFS integration and found that nearly all customers who attempted the integration were no longer using it.

Many integrations were abandoned because Agile teams track progress differently than traditional projects. Traditional projects typically plan for the entire scope of a project and use hours to track progress. Agile projects plan on demand, typically 2-3 sprints out, and often use story points to track progress.

While we believe in integration between TFS and Project Server, our current integration was not meeting most customer’s needs.

A partner solution

We understand that some customers have a valid need for Project Server/TFS Integration. Therefore, we have decided to work with partners who specializes in this area. To find out about your options, please visit the list of partners. If you are a partner that provides this solution, please reach out to us. We’d love to talk with you.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment on this blog post or send email to pstfsintfeedback@microsoft.com. Sending email will allow us to follow up and dig into any specific concerns you have without divulging information in a public forum.

If you are an active user of the existing Project Server/TFS Integration, we want to hear from you.

Thank you

Gregg Boer Program Manager, Azure DevOps

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