TFS Office Integration Installer

Brian Harry

One of the things I forgot to mention in my post about TFS 2015 Update 1 RC is that we have also shipped a preview of our new TFS Office Integration Installer (ISO image).  This new installer addresses a couple of scenarios:

1. People like project managers, BAs, etc that wanted to use our Microsoft Office integration capabilities used to have to install our Team Explorer package.  It was uncomfortably large and included a VS Shell instance that most of them really didn’t want.  This new installer just includes the Office integration component (Excel, Project, etc) and is therefore lighter weight.
2. We announced with the release of TFS 2015 the intent to make our PowerPoint storyboarding tool available without VS Enterprise/Test Professional but we didn’t provide an easy way to acquire it.  We’ve now included it in this Office Integration Installer, making it very easy to get with the rest of the Office integration tools.

The PowerPoint storyboarding tool is a really nice way to mock up user experiences quickly and easily.  You can leverage the PowerPoint skills you already have to build nice walk throughs of user flows before you invest in building them.  In building TFS and VSO, we use is all the time.  Here’s an example PowerPoint mockup from one of our walk-throughs of our new dashboarding feature that’s in progress. Right now, it’s buried on the VS 2015 Update 1 RC download page but we’ll add a new page to make it easier to find, understand what’s in it and download. Like most things we release, it will also work with previous releases on Team Foundation Server (you don’t have to be on TFS 2015 to use it).  I don’t recall the precise requirement but it certainly works back to TFS 2012.  And, of course, it works with VS Online. I hope this makes your TFS experience even better. Brian

Brian Harry Corporate Vice President, Cloud Developer Services

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