Overview of Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Features

By reading this topic, you can gain an overall understanding of how you can customize data synchronization between Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Project Server 2010. You can also review the differences in how Team Foundation Server integrates with Project Server 2007 and Project Server 2010.

The integration of Team Foundation Server and Project Server provides flexibility in how you can manage projects.

In this topic

• Synchronization Feature Summary

• Operational Differences Between Project Server 2007 and Project Server 2010

Synchronization Feature Summary

The following table describes the main features that support data synchronization between Team Foundation and Project Server.

Feature	Description	Related topic
Three types of synchronization	The synchronization engine performs three types of synchronization. This process captures and maintains data that relates to tasks and resources in both Team Foundation and Project Server while respecting the ownership of data by the project manager in the project plan.	Overview of the Synchronization Process for Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration
n-to-1 mapping of components	You control what participates in synchronization by configuring and customizing the integration of the two server products. The data synchronization engine supports an n-to-1 mapping from Project Server to Team Foundation. You can register multiple instances of Project Web Access or Project Web App (PWA) to Team Foundation Server and you can map multiple team project collections to an instance of PWA.	Mapping Project Server Components to Team Foundation Components
Tasks and work items that are synchronized	You can manage which types of work items participate in data synchronization and which specific tasks or work items are synchronized. In Project Professional, you set the Publish to Team Project value to Yes or No. In Team Foundation, you set the Submit to Enterprise Project to Yes or No.	Specifying the Work Item Types That Can Be Synchronized
Data fields that are synchronized	To synchronize data between an enterprise project plan and a team project, you must associate the work-item fields in Team Foundation with the fields in Project Server. You can add fields and specify how they synchronize. For example, you can share data that does not relate to schedules (such as cost centers, team names, or health status) if you add the fields that store these types of data to the mapping file. You can add fields or just use the default set of fields that are required to support synchronization.	Customizing the Field Mapping Between Project Server and Team Foundation Server
Traceability, update status, submissions, and rejections	As work items and tasks are created, updated, and synchronized, a record is written to the History field for work items in Team Foundation. In addition, you can find status information in the following fields on the Project Server tab for each work item: Last Submit Status, Last Submitted Date, Last Approval Status, Last Approval Date.	Project Server Fields Added to Support Data Synchronization
Submissions, approvals, and automatic approvals	Updates to work items are submitted to Project Server and remain in the status update queue until you approve or reject them. As a project manager, you can define a rule to automatically approve all updates that are submitted from Team Foundation Server to Project Server.	Top-Down Planning of Business Requirements within an Enterprise Project Plan Mapped to a Team Project
Resource rollup	In Team Foundation, rollup values are automatically calculated for Completed Work and Remaining Work of parent work items that contain child items. In addition, resources that are assigned to individual tasks appear as resources for the rollup of the task in Project.	Working with Resource Rollup in Enterprise Projects Mapped to Team Projects
Conflict resolution	A conflict can occur when team members change the value of a mapped field in both Team Foundation and Project Server at the same time. You can choose whether you want to always accept the value in Project Server or to maintain two distinct values, which is referred to as maintaining “two sets of books.” If you choose the latter option, data synchronization is suspended for those fields until they are assigned the same values manually.	Field Mapping XML Element Reference for Integration of Team Foundation Server and Project Server
Assigning resources	In Team Foundation, you can assign only one resource to a work item. You can assign multiple resources to a task in Project Professional and synchronize data for that task if you assign a primary owner or active resource to the task. In addition, parent tasks that contain the rollup calculations of child tasks also contain the rollup of work that are assigned to the owners of each task. This rollup of owners appears as multiple resources in Project Professional for the summary task.	Working with Resource Rollup in Enterprise Projects Mapped to Team Projects
Mirrored fields	In Team Foundation, you can store the values of Project fields and display them on the work item form. You can also find work items that contain one or more fields whose values differ from the values in the project plan.	Field Mapping XML Element Reference for Integration of Team Foundation Server and Project Server Monitoring Work Item Submissions and Resolving Rejections

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Operational Differences Between Project Server 2007 and Project Server 2010

The following table describes how you integrate Team Foundation Server with Project Server 2007 differently from Project Server 2010.

Operational area	Project Server 2007 with SP2	Project Server 2010
Setup	You must install the integration feature pack only on the App Tiers in the server farm. You must grant the service account for Team Foundation Server access to the Shared Services Provider (SSP). For more information, see Grant Service Account to Shared Services Provider for Project Server 2007.	You must install the integration feature pack on all Web Tiers and on App Tiers in the server farm. You must install the cumulative updates or modify the web.config file. You must grant the service account for Team Foundation Server Full Control permissions to the Project Server Service Application. For more information, see Add a Service Account to the Project Server Service Application for Project Server 2010.
Approval comments	Approval comments that the project manager specifies in PWA are not recorded in the History field for the work item.	Approval comments that the project manager specifies in PWA are recorded in the History field for the work item.
Automatic approvals	You can automatically approve changes that occur when data is synchronized. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft website: Approve or reject task updates.	You can automatically approve changes that occur when data is synchronized.
Automatic publication of updates	Not supported.	After installing Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Project Server 2010, you can configure rules that specify the types of requests that are published automatically with updates that you also have set to be automatically approved.

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See Also

Concepts

Overview of the Synchronization Process for Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration

Other Resources

Managing Projects Using Project Server and Team Foundation Server

Change History

Date	History	Reason
September 2011	Added link to information about how to set automatic approvals, and added information about support for automatic publication of updates with Project Server 2010 SP1.	Information enhancement.
April 2011	Removed inaccurate information about auto-publishing.	Content bug fix.