Connecting Team Foundation Server and MS Project - Experiences?

Question

I've read a number of articles (and methods) where people have integrated Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Project, which allows both project managers and developers to use tools their comfortable with. For example:

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/30187 (Article about connecting) http://www.codeplex.com/pstfsconnector (Third-party connector)

Has anybody tried one of these methods, and can I get some feedback on your experiences? Our PM group is pretty set on Project, and in the past, it's been cumbersome to manage tasks separately. If somebody out there can give me the thumbs up that there's some real benefit here, without unmanageable overhead, I'd like to move forward tying these two products together so we can manage from one place.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

I use TFS (VSTS 2005) and MS Project for all my projects. The only limitation so far in the current version is that you can only associate an MS project with one TFS project. This could be ok depending on what classification you have chosen for your TFS projects. I have so far organized TFS project by major functional groupings. E.g. - shared enterprise services - major functionality X (e.g. loan origination system) - major functionality Y (e.g. public web site) - major functionality X (e.g. underwriting sytem)

In this situation if I need to create a workplan for an IT project impacting 2 TFS projects, what I have done so far is: a) create an MS project for each of the 2 TFS projects - each associated with its TFS counterpart b) expose milestones at each of the 2 MS projects level c) create an overall summary MS project linking milestones from the subprojects. I do not map/connect this overall project to any TFS project

This has worked reasonably well over the past couple years.