A couple of weeks ago one of our great partners, eDev Technologies (makers of InteGREAT – an excellent formal requirements management tool for TFS), released a new set of tools called SmartOffice4TFS.  Whereas InteGREAT is a pretty comprehensive requirements suite, SmartOffice4TFS is intended for teams with a less formal process but who still need to be able to manage requirements as documents.

SmartOffice4TFS helps bridge the gap between the work that the development team is managing in TFS and stakeholders/customers/vendors/etc. that need a document.  To make SmartOffice4TFS even more attractive, eDev Technologies is offering a 40% discount to MSDN subscribers through the end of the year.

There are two parts to SmartOffice4TFS – SmartWord4TFS and SmartVisio4TFS.

SmartWord4TFS allows you to export TFS work items/requirements into document templates, update edit those documents and publish updates back into TFS.  It enables full round tripping.  This enables you to produce standard requirements documents from data in TFS and author TFS requirements online or offline.  Meanwhile, you get all the capabilities with MS Word – like SharePoint workflows for review and approval processes.

SmartVisio4TFS has similar abilities but designed for working with diagrams.  It enables you to link work items to individual elements of your diagram and can color the shapes on your diagram based on the state of the related work item.  Of course, it supports the same handy round tripping with TFS that the Word add in does.  As a really cool bonus, SmartVisio4TFS can process your flow diagrams and automatically generate test cases that cover all the branches in your process.

I’m really glad to see more cool products from eDev.  I encourage you to check them out.  You can learn more at: http://www.smartoffice4tfs.com/.  And don’t forget to ask about your 40% discount for MSDN subscribers.

Thanks,

Brian