Summary

Communication is going to be only as effective as you want to make it. But as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is critically important to the success of any project, whether you are writing software for the space shuttle - or building a dog house.

In this chapter, you examined some the communication challenges facing teams today, and some of the ways team communicate today, such as with e-mail, and telephones. You even looked at an example of using all these communications, and how it can lead to project failure.

After that, you dove into how Team Foundation Server helps you overcome all these communication challenges. With its central store of information, document management, work item tracking, and the ability to communicate across multiple platforms, Team Foundation Server is ideally placed to solve a majority of your communication needs.

Finally, you wrapped up the chapter learning about some possible uses of Team Foundation Server in the future. In the case of TeamLook, a communication tool from Personify Design, that future is now. You also learned how to write your own code to have Team Foundation Server send instant messages. The future looks very bright for Team Foundation Server, as more and more people take advantage of its extensibility to mold it to their needs.

This chapter on effective team communication should have you thinking about the best way for your team members to work with each other to achieve your goals. The next chapter should help you build on this way of thinking to make the most of your distributed teams.