With each release of Team Foundation Server, administration gets a little easier. The release of TFS 2010 introduces the Team Foundation Administration Console (TFS Admin Console) providing a much simpler approach to administering Team Foundation Server. However, even the TFS Admin Console does not provide any support for managing permissions between Team Projects, SharePoint, and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).
That’s where the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool comes in…
Here’s the official description from the TFS Admin Tool site:
The TFS Administration Tool allows Team Foundation Server administrators to manage user permissions on all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, and SQL Server Reporting Services. The tool also allows administrators to easily copy user permissions among team projects and to easily identify any missing permissions on any of the three platforms.
If you manage user permissions for any number of Team Projects, this utility is a must have!
As of a few days ago, Version 2.0 of the TFS Admin Tool was released. This release focuses on resolving several bug fixes and introduces a new feature – User Import. The new User Import feature allows you to easily copy user permissions from one Team Project to another – very handy!
Version 2.0 supports TFS 2005, 2008, and 2010 – with some caveats. Before installing the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool v2.0, you must have the following installed:
- Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (to update the above Team Explorer to SP1)
- Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010
NOTE: Even if you have Visual Studio 2010 installed, along with the Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 client, you will still need to have the Team System 2008 Team Explorer client (with SP1) installed. The TFS Admin Tool is currently compiled against the TFS 2008 Object Model and therefore must have the referenced assemblies installed on the client machine. At some point in the future, once some internal code refactoring has taken place, there will most likely be a version compiled directly against the TFS 2010 Object Model that does not require any of the TFS 2008 assemblies to be installed.
So, download the tool and try it out. Please provide feedback on the project site in the Discussions or Issue Tracker tabs.