Team Collaboration On Visual Studio Online

Introduction

This article will help you to work with Team Collaboration – Team Rooms on Visual Studio Online.

What is Team Collaboration?

Visual Studio Online provides us with powerful collaboration tools that help us to work effectively as a team. This demo shows one of the latest additions, the Team Rooms.

Note: Make sure that you have worked on my previous articles before you surf this.

Links:

• Click here to create a free Microsoft account (Outlook/Hotmail).
• Click here to learn how to create a Visual Studio Online account and creating a new team project with TFVC added with inviting the members to work on it.
• Creating a team project with Git
• Connected IDE Experience in Visual Studio Online.
• Customize your Visual Studio Online Project.
• Work with Sprints at your Visual Studio Online Team Project.
• Managing your project Work Flow with Kanban Board at Visual Studio Online.
• Creating and Uploading a Code to TFVC Version Control in Visual Studio Online.
• Setting up a Continuous Integration Build Definition.

Follow the below steps now.

Step 1: Go to the home page for the team project. Click on the available Team Room to access it.

Note: Team Rooms is a great collaboration tool which allows people in the team to discuss the project, get alerts about the status of key events, and keeps an historical record of all this information for future reference. It can be used to support daily meetings or to help distributed teams to keep in touch.

There is one team room already set up by default. However, more can be added from the Rooms View to support different discussions or project areas. In this example, two people are already connected to the room, third one being my sample user. If you want to simulate several people using the room at once, one way to do it is to have different browsers open (such as IE, Chrome and Firefox). And, each of them should be logged in with a different account. Although, it seems that you’ll only be able to type messages from Internet Explorer. Another option would be to log in from different user accounts or even from different (virtual) machines.



Step 2: Write a message for the other team members in the designated area.

Note: When you enter the room, you will see who is connected and what is the latest activity. You also have links for managing the users who are allowed to enter the room, along with the events to be tracked in this room.



Step 3: Write a message for one of the team members by including her name in the format @Name inside it. It will appear highlighted in that user’s browser.



Step 4: Write a message containing the identifier of a work item preceded by a ‘#’.

Note: You will get a link to a work item only if you include its Id preceded by the ‘#’ sign, in a message.




Step 5: Write a message. You can even include an emoticon in it.



Step 6: Click on the Manage events… link on the right.


Step 7: Configure an event for Work item updates.

Note: Events can be set up for different things happening during the project. People in the room will get notified when the event occurs.



Step 8: Change the state of a work item that is contained under the area you specified in the event definition, by opening it. Then, switch back to the team room.

Note: Events include relevant information about what happened and links to get more information.