Earlier, I wrote a post explaining where to find TFS Basic.  Someone asked a set of questions about TFS Basic, and I thought I’d post the answers here.

What features are in TFS Basic 2010?

Brian’s post describes a bit of the feature differences and also shows the installation process. It’s really much easier to talk about features not in Basic, as Basic is just TFS configured using a set of defaults to make the installation experience very simple. Basic does not configure SharePoint or SQL Reporting Services (RS), and because of the lack of RS there’s no warehouse. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s the same feature set as standard TFS. If you decide at some point later that you want to use those features, you can choose to configure them via the Team Foundation Administration Console (note that to use SQL Reporting Services, you must use full SQL Server and not Express).

You get additional features in TFS Basic of being able to use SQL Server Express 2008 rather than regular SQL Server 2008, though you are free to point Basic at an existing SQL server (default is to install SQL Server Express or reuse it if it is already installed), and you get the feature of being able to install on a client OS (Win7 or Vista).

Is TFS Basic limited to 5 users?  How can I add more?

No, TFS Basic is not limited to 5 users. You can have as many users as you like, so long as users 6 through N have TFS CALs, which are either purchased or ones included due to the user having an MSDN subscription. See my post with licensing comments from Doug Seven for more info. If you want to have more than 5 users, you may want to put TFS Basic on a Windows Server OS because the client OSes are limited to about 10 simultaneous connections, after which point connections are either queued (some buffer) or refused.

Is the new Excel reporting feature available (right click on a work item query and choose to create a report in Excel)?

You will not be able to use the Excel reports feature built into the product for TFS Basic since there is no warehouse.

Is web access available in TFS Basic?

TFS Basic does indeed include web access. There’s unfortunately no shortcut to get to web access via the right click menu in Team Explorer, which has been suggested. You can always find web access at http://yourserver:8080/tfs/web.