Team Foundation Server, For Free (Sorta)

As word gets out that Team Foundation Server has been signed off to RC (release candidate), which should be made available on MSDN soon, the plans for budget allocation and boss-justification must loom close for those who plan or hope to use it. Thankfully after a long, widespread blog dialog, involving key Microsoft decision-makers all the way up to "Soma" Somasegar, there may be a simple no-cost, free, limited solution for small teams. To appease the masses, MS is making available to those MSDN customers who currently have a "role" subscription (one of the premium MSDN subscriptions, aka a migrated Universal or Enterprise MSDN subscription) a free-for-five-users version of Team Foundation Server. They will still only have access to the development tools included in their role, and would need to purchase the Team Suite edition of Visual Studio to get the benefits of other roles, but at least now will have the following:

• New & Improved non-sourcesafe source control tool (now with Shelving!)
• Project Portals (via sharepoint)
• Built in Work-item & bug tracking
• Document management & planning
• Build Server (though this is not the continuous integration solution we were hoping for -- check out Automated Build Studio for that; that software rocks -- more in a later post).

Just to clarify, here's the word straight from Rick LaPlant's blog post:

"  The TFS 5 user version means 2 things. first, that the server is throttled to allow no more than 5 named users on the server. Second, it means that up to 5 people can connect to the server without purchasing anything else. Your question seemed to be about the CLIENT role based skus. If you currently have MSDN/U subscriptions when we ship later this year you will get one of the role based skus (dev/test/arch) for each MSDN/U license. If you want ALL roles for each person (4 people for you i think) then you would pay incrementally for the Suite. Now, in my post I said that for the 1st year (more precisely for 90 days after we RTM), you can get the Suite upgrade at retail for 2299, which is the SAME cost as MSDN/U retail upgrades today. So the net is, for 90 days after we RTM, you can get (at retail, different for volumen license) the full suite and a server that will scale to 5 people for no more than you'd pay today.

however, i do want to be clear one more time. The 5 user license to TFS is to the server. if you want all the roles for a single person, you have to buy the suite. we are making it cheaper for our best customers (MSDN/U customers) to get the suite so that each person can all of the client roles, but you still need the suite. "

So I have set up a TFS server, and am happily making work items, etc. There are things that I like & dislike about the product so far, but since this post is a bit on the long side already, that shall wait for later posts.