TeamSolutions TeamLook™ extends Microsoft Outlook and TFS so that all stakeholders in a software project can communicate more effectively and gain accurate visibility into project status. TeamLook™ connects to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) and enables users to view WorkItems, Reports, and other artifacts stored in their Visual Studio Team System installations. With constant synchronization TeamLook™ functions in a similar manner to other Microsoft Outlook features, reducing training costs and enabling organizations to realize immediate productivity gains.
TFS Outlook Integration features and benefits
FEATURES
|
BENEFITS
|
|
Create Work Item from an email
Create Team System Work Items, of the defined Project Work Item Types, from Outlook Mails.
|
Combine the communication and team projects domains.
|
|
Team Foundation Server and Project Folder View
|
|
Manage VSTS Team Projects along side Outlook folders
|
Single view into communication and project structure.
|
|
Team Reporting
Run Team Reports directly from Outlook
|
Generate Team Reports directly
|
|
Meeting Invitation from Work Item
Create a Meeting Invitation from a Work Item
|
Automatically populate meeting invitation information from Work Item
|
Creating Work Items: From Email using Right Click
TeamLook supports creating TFS Work Items directly from an Email. The ability to get communications into TFS empowers users to keep TFS more up-to-date with hot topics in current conversations.
Create new TFS items can be accomplished either from the 'New Work Item' toolbar menu, or via right-click.
Upon selecting the right-click option, you will be prompted to select the Server and Project, along with the Work Item Type you wish to create.
Once you have chosen your desired type, the new form will be opened with the content appropriately filled out. You can customize which email fields map to which TFS fields through the 'TeamLook Options' dialog.
Drag-and-Drop Support: Attachments
TeamLook has incorporated the most intuitive Drag-and-Drop scenarios to easily attach additional emails, and other Outlook artifacts, to your Work Items. You simply drag the contents from Outlook onto the “File Attachments” section of the Work Item Form.
In addition, you can drag documents, pictures, and any other kind of file onto the Work Item for attachment. This great speeds up the process of trying to add additional content to your TFS Work Items.
Drag-and-Drop Support: Work Items
TeamLook supports dragging other TFS artifacts (from Outlook) onto the file attachments tab. This gives you the quick ability to attach related work items to each other. In addition, if you would prefer to create a Link between Work Items, you can drag the Work Item from Outlook to the ‘Links’ tab.
Copy/Paste Support: Clipboard to Attachments
Similar to Drag-and-Drop, Copy/Paste is fully supported on the ‘File Attachments’ control. Anything on your clipboard (files, images, text, emails, work items, etc) will be detected and appropriately added to the Work Item. We have also built in right-click functionality to expose this functionality.
Customized Views and Grouping
Grouping of Work Items in Outlook
TeamLook provides users with the rich experience of grouping and organizing their work items much like they would their email inbox. This allows you to have multiple groupings in a hierarchial fashion, increasing the effectiveness of how you view Work Items.
Customized Views
TeamLook provides users the ability to customize the columns available for each VSTS Query. Any field available on the TFS server can be selected and displayed or the view can be populated from other existing query views. This allows very specific query views for customized Process Templates.
Create Email/Meeting/Task from Work Items
Creating an Email from a single Work Item
Creating a follow-up email, meeting, or task from an existing work item is easy with TeamLook! You can just right-click on the Work Items in your query folder or click on the TeamLook Ribbon icon. This efficiency allows the user to more quickly and accurately follow up on important work items and allow the team to collaborate more effectively.
Create an Email from multiple Work Items
Often when communicating about a situation in a VSTS team project, a single Work Item is not sufficient to provide the appropriate context. Using TeamLook's Email from Group Select feature, a user can efficiently create an email that contains a table view of the selected Work Items. This efficiency is more evidence that TeamLook enables users to make better decisions faster.
Open work item from TL generated email.
If you receive an email from someone that has links to TFS Work Items, TeamLook will allow you to directly open these Work Items (with the Work Item form). You can do this by either right clicking on the email from your mail folder, or from the inspector view when reading the email.
Quick Search
Using TeamLook and the 'Quick Search' functionality, you can quickly find work items based on a simple text search. This allows you to quickly search for work items in your TFS system without having to define a whole query just to find that item. You can configure which fields will be searched using 'Quick Search' to narrow down the results you will find. Once you find your item, you can do all the other rich editing features that TeamLook supports.
TFS Reports inside Outlook
Using TeamLook Reports you can stay informed with both detailed and aggregate-oriented project information. Only with TeamLook can you communicate with single-click contextual reports. Emails, meetings, or tasks can be easily created upon spotting trends or ambiguity in a team project with a TeamLook report.
Connecting to Multiple TFS Servers
TeamLook allows the user to associate and connect to multiple Microsoft Team Foundation Servers, each of which can contain multiple Team Projects. By clicking the TeamLook menu on the Microsoft Outlook Toolbar and selecting the TeamLook Options menu item, a user can connect to a number of Team Foundation Servers. For each server, specific projects can be brought into the TeamLook Projects View by clicking on the Add Projects button.
Custom Field to Email Mapping
The Project tab of the Teamlook Options Dialog provides an interface to specify the mapping between Work Item Type fields, specified by the Process Template used in a Team Project, to Outlook MailItem fields during an email to Work Item transformation.
TeamLook Explorer View (Query View)
The TeamLook Project View provides a structured and hierarchical view where users can quickly navigate their VSTS projects, enabling them to make quicker decisions. TeamLook brings together communication concepts and team project artifacts, enabling scenarios never before seen. These scenarios not only include viewing and running Team Reports directly inside Outlook but also creating an email while viewing a Team Report that contains the report as a visible attachment. More efficiency creating scenarios are described in more detail below.
Full-Right click Support
TeamLook uses the latest in VSTO technology (Outlook 2007) to give us access to append, change, and enhance the standard Right-Click menu options through Outlook. Virtually everywhere that TeamLook interacts with Outlook you will have Right-Click options to make TFS and Outlook integrate seamlessly.
Right-Click on a Work Item
Right-Click on a Query Folder
Right-Click on an Email
Bulk Edit
TeamLook enables users to change multiple attributes of a number of Work Items through a single click. As shown in the screenshot this is accomplished by group selecting a set of Work Items directly inside Outlook and using the TeamLook Toolbar. The 'Bulk Edit Work Items' dialog will appear and you can bulk edit many of the common fields on work items. If you are not allowed to change the values, the option will be greyed out (see screenshot).
Alert Subscriptions
Users can quickly and easily subscribe to projects alerts using the new Alerts Subscriptions dialog through TeamLook. Just by selecting a few drop down boxes alerts can be immediately sent to your email inbox for single, multiple, or all projects on a server.
Go To Work Item #
With 'Go To Work Item' you can quickly jump to a specific work item without needing a query to return a result. This is available from the TeamLook menu bar.
Creating a Work Item from multiple Emails
Similar to creating a work item from a single email, you can quickly create a work item with messages attached with multi-select. Just choose the relevant work items from your email box and choose 'New Work Item' from either the toolbar or right-click options. All the emails will be attached to the newly created work item!
Full Work Item Edit Support
1. Upon bringing Team Foundation Servers and Team Projects into your TeamLook Project View, specific Work Items can be viewed (in an aggregated list view), opened, modified, and published back to the Team Project.
2. While viewing or updating a Work Item, the TeamLook Work Item Toolbar allows you to create an email from the Work Item, create a meeting invitation from the Work Item, or create a personal task in your Outlook Tasks list.
Copy Work Item
The 'Copy Work Item' feature allows you to quickly copy all the fields from the current item into a new duplicate work item. This works on items that are "New" (not yet saved) or existing.
Using this feature you can quickly generate "Template" items and create many similar work items by only filling out the information once!
Create Related Work Item
Using TeamLook, you can easily create related Work Items with the 'Create Related' feature. This allows you to quickly create a related item in situations where a work item may spawn into other tasks/bugs/etc. Links are automatically generated for the work item relationships.
