New "Team System Web Access" is great!

August 2007 - We just loaded Team System Web Access 1.0 on our sandbox and we love it! The ability to start and stop and monitor builds is a wonderful addition. No need to fire up Studio just to launch a build. Or even better, we can now have our wireless deviced managers, start builds from their Blackberry's. I think Teamplain 2.0 had some of these features, but we stayed away from it since it was not "officially" released.

In addition to some new features, the load time has decreased significantly which is comforting. With Teamplain 1.0 it often took 5-10 seconds minimum for the application to load in the user's browser. While unscientific, Team System Web Access is loading in a second or so.

I also tested the Documents interface and it looks like a minor bug (actually it's quite major if you didn't abandon the interface like we did) with data loss was addressed. With Teamplain 1.0 we noticed that all changes were lost when checking the document back in. I'm not 100% sure if this is because we had something messed up or not. With Team System Web Access we are now planning to actually use the Documents interface.

We haven't played around with the Source Control tab yet, but there looks to be some nice light weight tools for viewing source and source meta-data.

Our final opinion will be made once we get this on our DEV and PROD systems, but so far we've had nothing but good vibes about this product. It will making adopting TFS by management (who doesn't want to install Visual Studio) much easier.

Thanks for releasing this before Orcas!