Greg Low has been in Canberra this week delivering one of our training courses and during the course of the week he has found a few issues which we need to address with an updated version of the courseware (basically bugs in the instructions and starter code).
Anyway – because I am also delivering the course at the end of the month I thought that I should keep those issues in my mailbox, but during the course of the week that has turned out to be about fourteen e-mails and I like to get down to zero items in my Inbox when I unplug for the evening.
The plan was always to manage our curriculum development efforts in Team Foundation Server so I created a Team Project using the Scrum process template for Team System (from the guys at Conchango). My next problem was how do I get these e-mails across to the TFS work item store with the minimum amount of effort.
My salvation was Teamlook (by Personify Design). Its an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows you to turn the e-mails that you read into work items. Installing and configuring Teamlook is pretty straight-forward, it asks you to tell it what Team Projects to wire it up to by default.
Its also possilble to map the title and body of the e-mail to the structure of the work item inside the e-mail configuration settings. In this case both Title and Description are pretty standard (although it did load this information directly from Team Foundation Server). Its also possible to define what the default settings for handling attachments is.
Once the configuration is done there is a new toolbar added to Microsoft Outlook that allows you to create an work item right from within your e-mail client. But the real value is when it transcribes the details from an existing e-mail.
Once the work item is saved it can be found inside Visual Studio by the development team and acted upon in the next sprint (assuming in this case that you are using the Scrum process template).
One of the things that I think that Team Foundation Server enables is a rick market for customisations and extensions to the product. Teamlook is a great example of an extension, and the Scrum for Team System process template is a great example of a fairly extensive customisation.