Installing integration (Must know)

We'll be installing the Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server in this section.

Getting ready

In the previous recipe we prepared the information we needed to ensure a successful integration. Now we'll build off of that as we install and configure the integration. Please take a moment to review the checklist before we begin. Our first decision point is whether or not this will be a test or production instance. While installation process is the same in either case, the configuration has some variations to consider.

Installation overview

How to do it...

The steps to install Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server are fairly simple. The server steps are as follows:

1. Insert the Team Foundation Server 2012 DVD / ISO in the drive, navigate to the Project Server Extensions folder, and launch the tfs_projectServerExtensions.exe to begin.

1. In the license terms' dialog box, accept the license terms, and then select continue.
2. When the next screen appears select Install Now.
3. On the last screen, select Close. You are now done with the installation.

An indication that you didn't remove the old Team Foundation Server 2010 Integration prior to attempting to upgrade to the 2012 edition will appear on the screen. You'll need to remove it with the Programs and Features dialog box in control panel to continue as shown in the following screenshot:

A successful installation will be indicated with the following dialog box:

Success!

Installing the client side is just as simple, the following are the steps:

1. Remove Visual Studio 2010 from the client machine.
2. Locate the Visual Studio 2012 installation media and install Visual Studio 2012 on the client machine, following the instructions as prompted.

As discussed in the previous recipe, there are a number of prerequisites and client software that need to be installed. On each machine that will be used by a project manager to synchronize data between enterprise project plans and team projects, you will need to install both Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer. In reality, the only reason you need Visual Studio is the add-in list. However, as far as this book is concerned, the only way to get the Visual Studio 2012 add-in list is to install a copy of Visual Studio 2012.

There's more...

Although we have covered most of the key parts already, there are a few other things you might want to consider. We'll cover those in the following sections.

Extension versions must match

A common scenario now is upgrading the Team Foundation Server versions to Team Foundation Server 2012. If this is your situation, you should uninstall the extensions from Project Server and then install the latest version of the Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server on all the servers where it was previously installed. The general order of operations in this case would be:

1. Uninstall Team Foundation Server 2010 and any extensions. Don't worry, all the configuration data is stored in TFS's database which the Upgrade process will detect.
2. Install/upgrade to Team Foundation Sever 2012 as per the installation guide.
3. Install/upgrade the Team Foundation Server Extensions as described in the previous recipe.

64-bit machines now required

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 now requires a 64-bit machine, as do the Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server.

No remapping needed

Some good news for upgraders, you will not need to unregister any previously mapped components prior to upgrading.

No additional Client Access License (CAL) needed

More good news, although you need to install Visual Studio 2012 to get the add-in list for Microsoft Project Professional, Microsoft tells us that we will not need a CAL to interface with the integration itself.

Note for upgraders from TFS2010

It has been reported that the installation procedure for Team Foundation Server 2012 may switch the service account from a specified domain account to network service. If this occurs, you will need to switch it back to the account you noted in earlier sections while preparing for the installation. Alternatively you can reset the project server permissions based on this new account. This can be done using the TFS administration console.

About this Except:

Portions of this excerpt were re-published by the author (me).  The full book is available for purchase here http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688540/?tag=packtpubli-20.  Note that some content may be different (pictures, charts, etc.) as I'm trying to format this post for the web.

Planning for a successful integration (Must know)

We will examine what's needed to ensure that your integration is successful. We'll cover the prerequisites and the planning needed to begin, scenarios for test or production environments, and different types of synchronization that are possible.

Getting ready

Using Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server, project managers can make Project Server to access real time project status and resource availability of teams who work in Team Foundation Server. Following the successful configuration of the two server products, the synchronization engine maintains scheduling data and resource usage in the mapped Project Server enterprise project plan and Team Foundation Server team project.

How to do it...

There are a few pieces of information we need to collect and a few configuration tasks we'll need to make sure have been completed properly.

Here is an installation and configuration requirement checklist to make sure that we are ready to begin:

Now that the common pre-configuration items are out of the way, we can move on with the planning.

How it works...

At the core of this integration are the work items in Team Foundation Server which synchronize with the Tasks in Microsoft Project plans in Project Server. Using this integration, project managers and software development teams can use whichever tools that work best for them, and share information transparently.

The integration and all products involved in it are scalable from installations of a few users to several thousands. You can easily scale this integration out by using multiple Project Web Access servers mapped to a multi server, that is, TFS deployment. We'll cover the specifics of the integration in a later section, but this is a good spot for an overview diagram.  

There's more...

We have a few final points to keep in mind, and some valuable tips to make your installations go smoothly. This will not be a complicated integration if we follow the given advice.

A time saver for your test installations

We all know it can take a serious amount of time to build your own testing and demonstration virtual machines. This is especially tough when you are just going to use it for a test installation or a pitch to technical management. Although the following VM link provided by Microsoft is one revision older than the one discussed here, it is much quicker to upgrade this one than to do a fresh installation. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft website:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=196413

You weren't planning a test environment? Now would also be a good time to plan a test system in your deployment schedule. It will not only help you to have an environment to test out configuration changes but will also be a good safety measure to ensure all your mapping is correct before you deploy to a production environment.

Active Directory – Highly recommended for production installations

Active Directory is technically not required, however it is highly recommended that you deploy Active Directory in your network. It will help with synchronization of the user accounts, groups, and services within Team Foundation Server and Project Server. Otherwise you'll be doing this manually between the two environments. If you haven't deployed Active Directory yet, but are planning to deploy it, now would be a good time to begin that.

SharePoint Authentication Mode

We mentioned this in the previous checklist, but it bears repeating here. The authentication that is assigned to the SharePoint web application for the instance of PWA must be set to Classic Mode Authentication. You will not be able to register the instance of PWA if the authentication is set to Claims Based Authentication.

Backup

A server based product cannot be mentioned completely without a discussion of backup. Do not begin any production installation or upgrade of any product mentioned here without involving a prior backup of all systems. Special attention should be paid to the backup of the Team Foundation Server system. If done improperly, the backup will put your TFS installation into an unusable state after a restore operation, and the worse part will be you won't know this until you start using it again. Please review Microsoft's current recommendation about using marked transactions in your backup strategy Understanding Backing Up Team Foundation Server
document is available at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253151.aspx

About this Except:

Portions of this excerpt were re-published by the author(me).  The full book is available for purchase here http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688540/?tag=packtpubli-20.  Note that some content may be different (pictures, charts, etc) as I'm trying to format this post for the web.

I know I mentioned it already, but these will be fairly long posts and I’m hunting for excepts that would make good entries.  I’m sure my regular readers will help me out if I put something out that doesn’t read well

My publishers are sponsoring a book giveaway contest.  So, here it is:  Come up with a good reason you’d like a free copy of my book (philanthropic project, etc.)  I will pick the best one out of the set (totally subjective I know) and the publisher will send you a copy of the book.  Fairly simple right ?  So either post a comment or send me email referencing this and that will be your entry.  Here is a link to my book on their site: http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-and-project-server-2010-integration/book

Good Luck!

In case everyone is wondering why I’ve been light on the blogging lately, this is it.  Just got done with publishing my first book with Packt Publishing.  It is titled Team Foundation Server 2012 and Project Server 2010 Integration How-to, and is available on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688540/?tag=packtpubli-20

The publisher also wanted me to share this link http://bit.ly/ZulWBG but it really will just bring you to their site for an ebook only ordering page.  I’ll post some excepts from the book here as well as some cool info the the MVP 2013 Global Summit.

The Team Portals in TFS 2010 were a huge bonus for any PM or Scrum Master looking to point stakeholders and teams to one spot for critical project communication and documentation.  The Team Portals are designed at a Team Project level. The problem you quickly run into with the Team Portals however if you further divide your Team Projects up by Areas for each solution.  You could certainly customize the templates or use the API to develop a tool to do solution level portals but that may be more work than you really want to do.

If your Team Project is already created, and you really need a portal for each area, the simplest solution would be to just manually create a portal using the sam design elements (very easy), copy the reports folder to a new one for just your area (to cusomize later) and create a team query to display the common lists by area and set the lists to use these. If you need to set the burndown (if you are using an Agile process template) to just use that area you'd need to also change the default filter on SSRS reports to reflect just the area you need.

I will update this post in the future with some specific instructions for doing this.

I get this question a lot, usually from a “pilot” project that turns into more and needs to fall under enterprise configuration guidelines. 

About half the problems I see with installs / re-configurations end up relating back to the accounts not set up properly for the tiers so please check the install guide to make sure your service accounts have the correct rights before you do this next step. Changing the accounts in TFS 2010 is relatively simple and the instructions are located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552178.aspx

You can either use the GUI or the command line TFSConfig. Instructions for both are located at that MSDN link. I summarized the TFSConfig instructions here:

To use the TFSConfig utility to change the service account

1. On the application-tier server, open a Command Prompt window and change directories to the directory that contains the TFSConfig utility.

   By default, this utility is located in Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools.

2. At the command line, type:
   TFSConfig Accounts /change /accountType:ApplicationTier
   /account:AccountName /password:NewPassword, and then press ENTER.

I recently got a question on this and it seemed useful enough for a post to my blog.  They installed TFS without initially integrating with SharePoint. They had many projects that don't contain SharePoint portals. Then they integrated SharePoint with TFS and can only set up a SharePoint portal with new projects created. Is there any way to create a SharePoint portal for existing TFS projects? Are there any workarounds to achieve this goal?

The answer is yes and yes, and there are a few options to get this done:

Depending on how many you have to do there are two basic approaches that I've used. To begin you need to be in the Project Administrators group or have the View Collection-Level Information and Edit Collection-Level Information permissions set to Allow.

Manual Method, good if you just have a few. Follow the instructions one MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd386320.aspx . Basic steps are:

1.In Team Explorer, right-click the name of the project, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Portal Settings.
2.On the Project Portal tab, select the Enable project portal check box.
3.Click Use this SharePoint site, and then click Configure URL.
4.In the Web application list, click a SharePoint Web application.
5.In Relative site path, type the relative path of an existing SharePoint site.As you type the path, it appears at the end of the value in URL.
6.In URL, click the link, verify that the path is correct, and then click OK.
7.If you want this SharePoint site to show data for this project, select the Reports and dashboards refer to data for this team project check box.
8.Click OK.

Scripting with File.BatchNewTeamProject, more complex but creates the reports as well and good if you have a bunch to do at once. I did a few hundred in fairly short order using this method. Follow the detailed steps here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff462695.aspx .