TeamLook: Create workitems and view reports from within Outlook

If you’re not a developer yourself, but you do work with Work Item Tracking (WIT) a lot, like project managers or requirements managers, etc, currently to use the Team Foundation Client-tools, you need to start Visual Studio.NET 2005 as it’s the main IDE where everything comes together.

Personify Design has come up with an add-on for Outlook that enables you to work with WIT and view reports from within Outlook. This way you can create workitems from the tool that usually opened anyway.

The UI for creating the workitems is pretty much the same as the standard UI (I assume they support customized workitem-types as well, because I created several customized types (including customized UI-forms) for my company.

In our company we are currently beta-testing TeamPlain, which has similar functionality, but provides a web-interface. You may want to check out their product as well: http://www.devbiz.com/teamplain/webaccess.

Except for the web-access solution, they also have a plugin for Visual Studio.NET 2003. The plugin would definately be usefull for people who still use VS 2003, but already store their sources in the Team Foundation Server (which is possible using the Source Control Provider for TFS, sorry can’t find a url right now). This way you can use the WIT-features as well.

(Robert te Kaat)