All teams have ‘Stakeholder’, the people the are driving a project forward, who want the new system to be able to do their job; but are often not directly involved in the production/testing of the system. In the past this has been an awkward group to provide TFS access for. If they want to see any detail of the project they need a TFS CAL, expensive for the occasional casual viewer.
Last week Brian Harry announced there would be a licensing change in VSO with a ‘Stakeholder’ license. It has limitations, but provides the key feature they will need
- Full read/write/create on all work items
- Create, run and save (to “My Queries”) work item queries
- View project and team home pages
- Access to the backlog, including add and update (but no ability to reprioritize the work)
- Ability to receive work item alerts
The best news is that it will be a free license, so no monthly cost to have as many ‘Stakeholders’ on you VSO account.
Now most of my clients are using on-premise TFS, so this change does not effect them. However, the same post mentions that the “Work Item Web Access” TFS CAL exemption will be change in future releases of TFS to bring it in line with the ‘Stakeholder’.
So good new all round, making TFS adoption easier, adding more ways for clients to access their ALM information