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- http:\/\/www.teamcompanion.com\/blog<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
- http:\/\/ognjenbajic.com\/blog<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
TeamCompanion is an Outlook plugin that integrates all your TFS work management in one place.\u00a0 It makes your TFS work item queries, reports, documents, etc show up in the Outlook content bar just like your mail, calendar, tasks, etc.\u00a0 It is VERY well done and very seamless.\u00a0 I\u2019ve used it for almost a year now and find it to be a great way to interact with TFS.<\/p>\n
This screen shot of TeamCompanion demonstrates several things: 1) a Team Explorer like tree on the lower left for navigating your TFS content, 2) a hierarchical work item query with cool grouping ability to easily organize the results (here by State and Assigned to), 3) the preview form of the selected work item that is fully editable in place and 4) all the operations you can do on work items in Outlook (even including generating reports in Excel like you can from Team Explorer).<\/p>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/5618.4_HierachicalQueryWithGrouping_AvailableActions_thumb_6987E096.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nTeamCompanion also supports the simple and powerful search style that Outlook uses.\u00a0 This includes both full text search and searches on specific fields.\u00a0 Here TeamCompanion is showing all work items from the query results where the Remaining work < 9 and Assigned To starts with A.<\/p>\n
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![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/1401.8_SearchWithGrouping_3_thumb_7A7BE8AC.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAnother VERY NICE Outlook inspired feature is formatting of \u201crecently changed items\u201d.\u00a0 I love that in Outlook my unread mail looks very different than my read mail and I\u2019ve always wanted that for my TFS work items.\u00a0 If you comment on my work item I\u2019d really like to see it appear differently so that I know I should look at it \u2013 with TeamCompanion, it does!<\/p>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/4064.12_ChangedWorkItemsVisibleAfterRefresh_thumb_5843DD26.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAnd, of course, let\u2019s not forget that we\u2019re in Outlook, so integrating TFS work items with Outlook functionality would be nice.\u00a0 With TeamCompanion, you can turn an email message into a work item (including the ability to attach the email thread), easily send work items in email, create an Outlook task for a work item (along with all of the Outlook task functionality, like reminders) and more.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a screenshot of what using Outlook\u2019s task functionality with TFS work items looks like:<\/p>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/4643.14_ReminderForAWorkItem_thumb_2EEC9528.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAll of that is VERY cool, but my favorite thing of all is offline support!\u00a0 All of my work item data can be stored offline and enable a pretty impressive experience when I\u2019m on the go.\u00a0 I can view my cached work item query results, even filter and search them while I am offline.\u00a0 I can view the work items, attachments, links etc.\u00a0 In the current version, as you can see in the screenshot here, the work item form is a read-only HTML rendering while offline, but in the upcoming version, work items will be editable while offline too.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen a demo of it and it\u2019s really hot.\u00a0 With offline support, TeamCompanion also offers some cool \u201cwhat-if\u201d capabilities.\u00a0 I can edit a whole bunch of work items, drag and drop them around to change their relationships and if I\u2019m ultimately not happy with the result I can discard all the changes I\u2019ve made and revert back to the \u201cbaseline\u201d data.\u00a0 Very, very nice!<\/p>\n
- http:\/\/ognjenbajic.com\/blog<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/5141.26_Offline_Filter_thumb_05954D2A.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/1832.11a_SchedulingQueryExecution_Detail_thumb_49F53E69.png\")
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