Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 is now available!

Buck Hodges

August 29th, 20080 0

We’ve now released the final version of TSWA 2008 SP1, which had previously been released as a community technology preview (CTP). There are some fantastic new features in this release, including the ability for users without CALs to create work items.

Also, this release includes 10 languages: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, and Italian. All 10 languages are included in the download.

Since the installation package includes all ten languages, you may wonder why you can choose the language on the download web page. It turns out that the installer itself can only support one language for the installation wizard. So, when you choose the language on the download web page, you are choosing to download the installer in that language. The actual product that gets installed is the same for all languages and includes all languages.

Download Team System Web Access 2008 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ECD00BA-972B-4120-A8D5-3D38311893DE

New features in TSWA 2008 SP1 (compared to TSWA 2008)

Work item only view (accessed at http://tswa-server:8090/wiwa) provides access for users within your company that don’t have a TFS client access license (CAL), which was made possible by a licensing change in TFS for the 2008 release. It allows you to create new work items and edit work items you have created. Users of the full TSWA features must have CALs. The feature was previously available as a separate download called Work Item Web Access (WIWA) in the CTP. We’ve consolidated it into the TSWA installation process for the final release.
This release supports running a single instance with multiple languages.
Work item template URLs allow you to easily create an URL to include in emails, for example, so that users file bugs with particular fields pre-filled according to your needs. I wrote a post about this very useful feature in TSWA tip: How to use the new TSWA template URL feature (initial value URL).
Share ad-hoc work item queries by including WIQL in the URL. Normally, queries can only be shared by saving them as Team Queries in Team Explorer. Using this feature, you can embed the query in the URL by using the work item tracking query language directly.
Find and view Shelvesets from within TSWA. For example, you can use this feature to perform code reviews using only your browser.
Improved work item search syntax (e.g., Title:”Bug Bash”) provides greater flexibility in searching for work items, greatly expanding the original search feature. The search syntax follows Outlook and web search engine syntax. You can find some more examples of using it in my post about the release of the CTP (second half of that post).