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Access a Team Project Portal or Process Guidance

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You can access your team project portal to upload and view shared documents, reports, dashboards, and other information that relates to a specific team project. You can also access process guidance to understand how to manage types of work items that your team uses.

The process template that was used to create your team project determines the artifacts and the process guidance that are available for your team project. For information about the artifacts that are defined for the default process templates provided with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, see Artifacts (Agile), Artifacts (CMMI), and Scrum Process Template for Visual Studio ALM.

Note

If your team project does not have a project portal enabled, you cannot access some artifacts, such as dashboards, Office Excel reports, and workbooks for that project.

In this topic

  • Determine if your team project portal is enabled

  • Determine if process guidance is enabled

  • Access a team project portal site

  • Access process guidance

If your team project has a project portal and process guidance documents, you can access them by using the procedures in this topic. If you have problems accessing either the project sites or process guidance documents, contact your Team Foundation Server administrator or your team project administrator to make sure that your user account has the permissions described in the following section.

Required Permissions

To perform these procedures, you must be a member of the Team Foundation Valid Users security group. If the necessary security permissions are set explicitly, you must have your View project-level information permission on the team project set to Allow. You must also be a member of the Windows SharePoint Services Reader security group. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

Determine if your team project portal is enabled

The project portal is a site configured by using SharePoint Products that is created when the team project is created or it is added later. The project portal provides access to shared documents and dashboards.

If you cannot access Office Excel reports or dashboards, you might want to verify whether a portal has been enabled for your team project.

  • In Team Explorer from the Home page, choose the Settings icon Settings icon, and then choose Portal Settings.

    The Project Portal Settings dialog box opens.

    Project Portal Settings dialog box

    If the Enable team project portal check box is selected, your team project portal is enabled. If it is not and you want to enable a portal, see Configure a Project Portal or Process Guidance.

Determine if process guidance is enabled

Process guidance provides information about how to coordinate work on a team project, and how to use a type of work item in the overall project life cycle. Process guidance can provide details about a team project, such as how to complete work item fields, examples of healthy and unhealthy reports, query descriptions, roles to assume, activities to complete, and other information.

Some process guidance links will work only if process guidance has been enabled for your team project.

  • Continuing from the previous procedure, choose the Process Guidance tab.

    Process Guidance dialog tab

    If the Enable the link to process guidance check box is selected, process guidance is enabled.

    If the check box is not selected and you want to enable process guidance, see Configure a Project Portal or Process Guidance.

Access a team project portal site

The project portal is a site that is created by using SharePoint Products when the team project is created or the site is added later. The project portal is the central location for you to view the status of the team project and to access dashboards, Excel reports, and other artifacts that are shared with team members.

To view the project portal from Team Web Access

  • In Team Web Access, on the Home page, choose the Go to project portal link.

To view the project portal from Internet Explorer

  • Open a browser window and type the address where your project portal has been configured.

    Note

    The team project portal can be located on any server that runs SharePoint Products.

    To determine the URL for your project portal, open the Project Portal Settings dialog box as described earlier in this topic.

Access process guidance from work items or reports

You can access process guidance for work items and reports.

  • From Team Explorer, choose the Open process guidance for work item process guidance icon from an open work item.

    Note

    The Open process guidance for work item process guidance icon appears only on the work item forms opened from Team Explorer and only when your team project has process guidance enabled and configured. See Configure a Project Portal or Process Guidance.

  • From an open report in Report Manager, choose the How to Use this Report link at the bottom of a report.

    Depending on your settings, a web browser page show the MSDN content, or your local help content opens, or your customized process guidance opens.

  • Browse the process guidance provided for each of the default process template from one of these topics: Visual Studio Scrum 2.0, MSF for Agile 6.0, and MSF for CMMI 6.0.

See Also

Concepts

Configure a Project Portal or Process Guidance

Working with Team Foundation Clients

Other Resources

Working within Team Web Access