Newbie: Understanding work items

I'm in the process of evaluating TFS and VSTS on an isolated network with an eye towards upgrading our development. We're a very small shop, so we should be able to get along nicely with 5 client licenses and using minimal process (eventually upgrading our process model as we grow).

I'm trying to understand something about work items and I can't seem to find the precise scenario I'm wrestling with covered anywhere.

First, I want to record enhancement requests. I'm pretty sure based on my understanding that's easily enough done by making a custom work item based on "Bug" with some minor variations on the fields. I prefer to keep bugs and enhancement requests separate (a bug *will* be resolved, an enhancement request may not be).

But here's where I'm stuck. In any operation, in theory anybody in the company can log a bug or enhancement request. At the moment, the only way I can see to allow, say, the company president to log something is for him to actually install the whole freaking VSTS client on his machine (or Team Explorer, which is essentially just as bad).

Currently we're using a separate Sharepoint installation for issue tracking. Everybody has access to check the pool and log new items. I know I can probably do something in the project portal on the TFS Sharepoint site, but then there's no integration between that and work items (unless some poor sap has to manually re-type new issues as new work items and back).

Please tell me I'm missing some fundamental component or concept.

Brad.

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Newbie: Understanding work items

Kulwant
Right. I need to give access to other people within the company to create work items. For example, like most software shops we have a guy who does front-line Support. When a problem report comes in from the field, he attempts to reproduce it and collect data so that he can log a bug (or update an existing bug).
Or our company president goes visiting customers, and wants to log enhancement requests. Right now his idea of submitting an enhancement request is to scribble something on a napkin and hand it to us, resulting in the obligatory game of 20 Questions to figure out what he was actually talking about.

So right now it looks like the options are:

1) *Everybody* needs to install Team Explorer and slog through all the extraneous stuff to get at the small handful of features they need access to,
2) Buy a third-part product that adds the requisite functionality, or
3) Code my own solution from scratch (like I have time for *that*).

I was rather hoping there was something in the Project Portal (Sharepoint) that allowed this, but it looks like the portal is pretty much a read-only window.
It indeed looks like TeamPlain Web Access Lite adds the missing functionality for us. I'm going to bookmark that in case it turns out to be the most viable option.

Brad.
ash927

Hmmm I don't know if I understood your problem, are you asking if there is any other way to give access for creating new items, to people, without the need of installing Team Explorer

If this is the point, there is one tool on the market for doing this in a website, it's called Team Plain, I haven't tested it, but it will solve your problem.

Also, you can do your own development, based on the work items object model, to do that, with .NET.
Soulia

You are correct Brad. We currently do not have web UI for work item tracking. TeamPlain however does:

http://www.devbiz.com/teamplain/

Cheers
Newbie: Understanding work items

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