Microsoft Ending Team Foundation Server Extension for SharePoint

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a Microsoft product that covers the entire application lifecycle and project management capabilities including storing documents such as Requirement documents, reporting, maintaining source code, project management including agile and waterfall structure, automated builds, lab management, testing and release management capabilities.  TFS also provides integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse.

 

TFS provided SharePoint integration since its launch in 2005. This includes dashboards, site templates creation and document management in SharePoint. On August 21st 2017, Gregg Boer on MSDN on behalf of Microsoft, has announced that with the next TFS major release Microsoft will no longer provide an extension for SharePoint integration. The reason behind this is that TFS has evolved with its own extensive dashboards and there is a minimal requirement of integrating it with SharePoint. On the other hand, SharePoint has evolved with team sites that replace the old site templates making it powerful to maintain documents and project-related content and sharing through SharePoint without having integration with TFS. A major reason for this is that SharePoint is evolving into On-Premise and cloud.

 

Additionally, Microsoft has no plans to go back to TFS 2017 and add support for installing the TFS Extension for SharePoint on SharePoint 2016. Now, what about the users that are using older versions of TFS extension in SharePoint? Microsoft will provide a solution to remove old extensions of TFS from SharePoint. TFS 2017 and below will continue to support the compatible versions of SharePoint.

 

The reasons:

  1. TFS/SharePoint integration required TFS extension installed on the server
  2. TFS extension only runs if both TFS and SharePoint are on Premise (no support for cloud)
  3. Microsoft is moving to public APIs such as SharePoint framework for extensibility which TFS does not support

 

The impact:

  1. Option for creating SharePoint site will no longer be offered in TFS Microsoft Teams will be used in SharePoint to access shared resources. TFS already has integration with Microsoft teams
  2. TFS web parts in SharePoint will no longer be available, Instead TFS has its own dashboard for reporting purpose
  3. Excel Charts will continue to work that can access TFS data to be shown in SharePoint However, automatic deployment and configuration of Excel charts when creating the SharePoint site will not be supported instead this will be configured manually if required.
  4. TFS will no longer support the Documents pane within Team Explorer.