Using Microsoft Project and Visual Studio Team System Together DevX Article

Combine Microsoft Project and Visual Studio Team System for a One-two Punch of Productivity

"Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) provides tools for every role in a typical software development team: Architects, Project Managers, Developers, and Testers. It enables project managers to use the tools they know well—Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel—to store project management data in Team Foundation Server, the collaboration server that is part of Visual Studio Team System. This article explains how to use Microsoft Project to work with VSTS data and describes the benefits of doing so.

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Comparing MS Project Server and VSTS

MS Project Server 2003 is an enterprise project management product with features such as project scheduling and management, resource utilization and billing, timesheets etc. It also allows multiple members to work on shared data by providing a Web based interface for viewing and updating project plan assignments. MS Project Server is fully integrated with MS Project (client) as one can publish assignments from MS Project to MS Project Server and view the updated assignments back in MS Project.

As VSTS has similar features in terms of shared data and MS Project integration, it is often compared with MS Project Server 2003. But these two products are entirely different products targeting different domains. Whereas Project Server targets enterprise project management domain, VSTS targets software development lifecycle domain. VSTS does not only provide assignments (or tasks), but also provides extensible work item infrastructure that can create customized work items as per project requirements. Because of its tight integration with Visual Studio IDE, VSTS allows team members to update their tasks and other work items from the IDE itself.

So both the products provide complementary features and have small set of features that are common; this commonality gives scope for integration between the two products. Although there is no built-in integration between the two products in version 1 of VSTS, Microsoft plans to provide tight integration in version 2 of VSTS. Also, there is initiative in the community to develop a connector between Project Server and VSTS. The details about the initiative are available at the GotDotNet site."

This is a cool article, one that might come in handy when VSTS ships...

(via Rob Caron - Combining Project and Team System)