Who Is This Book For? | Professional Team Foundation Server

Unlike other Wrox books, the target audience for this book is not primarily developers. Sure, Team System is a product oriented toward the process of software development. However, apart from the official documentation, a few blogs, and the Microsoft Forums, there isn't much substantial coverage anywhere on how to use the product end-to-end, how to perform essential tasks, and how to cope with special development environments.

The main target audience for this book is project managers and IT administrators-those who will administer the product on a daily basis, run a software project, set up users, security, and so forth. As a result, you can filter the chapters of the book based on each role.

Project Managers and Business Analysts

This book provides project managers with a great overview of how the software development life cycle is managed in Team System using Project Management Institute (PMI) principles outlined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). We show you how to plan, set up, and track your software development projects and create custom project templates to fit your best practices and processes. We even show you how to complete the project at the end-including how to save your work and implement process improvement. The whole book is informative of course; however the following chapters will be especially interesting to project managers:

Chapter 1-Planning a Team System Deployment
Chapter 9-Creating Custom Development Tools
Chapter 10-Extending the Windows SharePoint Team Portal
Chapter 11-Administering and Customizing Work Items
Chapter 13-Managing Your Team Projects
Chapter 14-Effective Team Communication
Chapter 15-Working with Geographically Distributed Teams
Chapter 16-Monitoring Your Team Project Metrics Using SQL Server Reporting Services
Chapter 17-Completing Software Projects

For business analysts (and business process analysts), this book provides a guide to converting business requirements into assets that fit perfectly into Team System. In addition, this book serves as a nice guide to pragmatically determine the return on investment (ROI) of a tool like Visual Studio 2005 Team System within your environment.

IT Administrators

In delving into this book, you might be quite surprised. It is very strongly oriented toward IT professionals. We cover such topics as security, backup/recovery, and setting up your network on Active Directory (AD)-all the common tasks you would come to expect from an operational perspective. Team System is a huge product including several versions of Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, SQL Server 2005, and Windows Server 2003. It can be difficult to get a handle on all the specific and pragmatic operational information available for Team System. We attempt in this book to sum it all up for you in a convenient format. If you are an IT professional, the chapters that will likely interest you include the following:

Chapter 1-Planning a Team System Deployment
Chapter 2-Advanced Installation and Tools Migration
Chapter 3-Configuring Team Foundation Build
Chapter 4-Setting Up Security
Chapter 5-Team Foundation Server Backup and Recovery
Chapter 12-Setting Up Team Foundation Version Control
Chapter 15-Working with Geographically Distributed Teams
Chapter 17-Completing Software Projects

Importan

One of the things that might jump out about these topics is that they reflect some of the requirements outlined in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This is not a coincidence-the book does not comprehensively cover all of ITIL but certainly provides a baseline, and a great starting point.

Developers

If you are a developer and you also play the role of the project manager (or you are setting up Team System for a small team of developers), then this book will be quite useful for you. If you are just a pure programmer, Part III (Extensibility and Customization) includes some great info on creating custom tools that integrate with Team Foundation Server, developing custom SharePoint components (for the project portal), customizing work items, creating reports, working with Team Version Control, and scripting Team Foundation Build (Team System's enterprise-class build engine). The book also serves as a great map to provide you with a big picture look at the product. You will definitely want to take a closer look at the following chapters:

Chapter 8-Managing Schemas Using Team Edition for Database Professionals
Chapter 9-Creating Custom Development Tools
Chapter 10-Extending the Windows SharePoint Team Portal
Chapter 11-Administering and Customizing Work Items
Chapter 12-Setting Up Team Foundation Version Control

Database Professionals

What exactly is a database professional? If you look at the functionality of Team Edition for Database Professionals, the tool provides support for both the database administrator and the database developer. The database administrator can back up, administer, and deploy database schemas very easily without impacting the production database. The database developer provides you with the ability to do unit testing on schemas and stored procedures to refactor and build database projects as first-class citizens within your development environment. Databases can now be stored in version control, integrated in the server, and much more.

Important

IT administrators are greatly encouraged to look at the administration chapters mentioned earlier in the introduction. The same applies to database developers and the developer chapters.

Enthusiasts

Team System is primarily designed for large software development teams. So what if you are an enthusiast or a micro ISV (Independent Software Vendor)? Can you still use the product? Some of the core advantages of Team System are the management of work item tasks and larger scale user and project management. In most cases, these features will be of little use to you. What may be useful to you is the build engine, version control system, and, to some limited degree, the project portal. One of the great benefits of this book is that you will learn how software development works on a higher order of scale, which may help you from a career perspective if you wish to work for a large development team or you just want a greater understanding of the product.

If you are a consultant, this book is practically a how-to guide. A lot of the information in the book is based on practical experience implementing and deploying Team Foundation Server. Therefore, if you have to wear the project manager/IT professional/developer hats all at once, this book is written for you.