Friday, January 25, 2008

Statistics for TfsWitDisplayNames Issue

I was asked to collect some statistics on how often we run the TfsWitDisplayNames tool to fix our 'displayName' issue. Here are our results for the past two weeks.

1/14/08 - one time for 1 user. Changed business *units.
1/14/08 - one time for 1 user. Changed first name.
1/18/08 - one time for 1 user. Changed business units.
1/22/08 - one time for 119 users. Changed business unit name.
1/23/08 - one time for 3 users. Left company or changed business units.
1/25/08 - one time for 1 users. Left company.

As you can see, on average we do an update about every other day. The large change you see on the 22nd was due to our business unit name change. That is not normal, but does happen as you can see.

Overall the tool works very well. Other than the issue that I posted on here, we've had pretty good success using it. We have a modest number of work items (around 3000) so the tool runs very quickly.

The system administrators and DBAs don't like it very much as we have to run the tool with an account that has access to the data tier. Since this is against company policy, we've had a temporary account created until this is fixed. I threw out the idea that maybe we should have the DBA run the command for us, at which point they quickly gave us access ;).

Hopefully this provides some quantitative data of how much this Bug affects our group. While not overly difficult to fix, it's a pain to have to do this every few days.

* The Active Directory 'company' field is used for our business unit names. Thus when someone changes business units, the 'company' name is modified. 'company' is then used in our 'displayName' format. The overall 'displayName' format is Lastname, Firstname (Company). If you're wondering why don't we change this, it's because this is the format for 33,000 employees and the business doesn’t want to change it for everyone, just because TFS has an issue. I can't argue.

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