Team Foundation Server Defect Tracking License Change - Create new Work Items for "free" now, no CAL needed...
adamga's WebLog - TFS for Defect Tracking! Licensing Change!!!
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Licensing Changes in Team Foundation Server / CAL 2008
Microsoft has made one licensing change in the Team Foundation Server CAL requirement with the release of VSTS 2008. The change is as follows: You do not need a CAL to access work item tracking functionality, to create new work items or view and update work items you opened.
You may do the following:
· Open a new work item of any type within the system.
· Access to work items opened only by you. You cannot view or access a work item opened by anyone else.
· Edit any work item you opened to clarify the original entry, change work item fields, or make annotations to the discussion of the opened work item. You cannot resolve, close or change the work item state in any way.
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This change can help lower your TFS CAL license count requirements, depending on your workflow, procedures, etc.
I'm thinking that this would help where your process has QA, Testers, Power Users, beta testers, etc who need create defects/work items. If you want to allow anyone in your organization to create work items, then this change could be a BIG plus for you...
Update #1 11/23/2007 @ 9:45AM PST:
bharry's WebLog - TFS Licensing Change for TFS 2008
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The new licensing provisions are designed to make it easy if you want to allow lots of people in your company to use TFS to file bugs, feature requests, etc and have them available for your development team. Specifically they allow an unlimited number of users in your company to create any work item, query for work items they have created and view or update any work item they have created all without a CAL. This right comes with your Team Foundation Server Standard Edition server license and requires no additional purchase.
Please keep in mind that this is focused narrowly at this scenario. If this works well, customers like it, people understand the restrictions and use it properly, I expect we'll look at trying to simplify licensing around other similar scenarios in future versions of TFS.
The bad news part of this is that we really don't have any UI that restricts users to exactly this scenario right now so it's hard to know you are in compliance. We have committed to producing software changes within the next year that would allow organizations to feel comfortable that their users are in compliance. ..."
A little more details and coming attractions related to this change.
I like the self service capabilities this enables...
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4 comments:
I like the idea of the new licensing for users who need to file bugs etc, however what is the reasoning behind restricting these users from viewing/quering bugs created by other users?
Before a user creates a duplicate bug in our tracking system we get our users to search the existing bugs to make sure this issue has not been previously raised. Without this functionality we would either have to keep the CAL licenses for these users or drop the CAL licenses and deal with duplicate work items in our workflow.
Neither of these options however will benifit our department.
Yeah, I hear you... I think that's pretty strange and limiting too.
I guess they are walking a razor's edge between too little and too much.
I think in the end they'll open it more, to let you easily view others, but only change your own. That should leave enough reasons to buy CAL's for the Dev/QA team and yet open enough that it's usable for normal business purposes.
We'll have to see how it works out when they tweak the UI like bharry mentioned...
I agree Greg, I think giving a organisations product support unit the ability to create/modify their own work items and the ability to search all other work items (to prevent duplicate work items) would have been a much better licensing arrangement, while still requiring developers, testers and project managment to buy CAL's.
If there are any Microsoft licensing guys out there I sure it's not to late to change this before you add the UI restrictions into TFS. I'm sure this would make many people happy including our organisation. :)
I need some help with this,
I have to create users for the web access tool without using the CAL (the new feature that TFS 08 have)
but, when you do that you have to create the user and give permissions to the project. My big problem is How i create the user without using the CAL???? Tks!
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