Road trip!

I'm about to embark on 2 weeks of customer visits over the next 3 weeks.  I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to see how real enterprise customers are using Team Foundation Server.  As I go through the visits, I'll try to blog about my experiences, but I'll keep the customer names anonymous to protect the innocent.  Here's what I know about them so far:

Customer A is an IT department in what has has traditionally been a Java & C++ shop.  They focus on building internal applications to support their larger business.  They're committed to migrating their applications to .NET and will be using VSTS/TFS as their toolset going forward.  It will be a staged rollout, so they're interested in how they can integrate TFS with existing legacy systems as they progress through their migration.

Customer B is still primarily in the evaluation stage.  They've committed to using TFS and are still getting their feet wet as far as installing a pilot environment, thinking about deployment strategies/issues, etc.  They're already a "Microsoft shop" and have lots of projects underway using .NET v1.1 and v2.0.

It's going to be quite a learning experience for me too.  One of the best ways to make sure you know something well is to get to the point that you can teach it to others.  So I'm ramping up on some of the TFS features I'm not yet familiar with (e.g. reporting, methodology template customization, etc.).  I'll post any interesting tips/tricks I discover along the way.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  I'm just 1 day into my road trip, and already I've had some enlightening moments.  For example,...
• Anonymous
  August 28, 2006
  In a private reply to my recent post on TFS Partitioning, someone raised the question of team site partitioning. ...