Two teams(Developers and Designers) in 2 separate cities

Question

Background - There are two teams, a team of developers and a team of css/html desingers - We're using sharepoint to build their website - TFS is our source code respository - The designers have their own Sharepoint dev site to test their HTML/CSS if needed

Problem I'm in the developer's team who's main responsibility is to receive HTML/CSS markup and merge their work with the developer's work. It's a headache to merge 2 teams' worth of work. How do i get rid of this merging process? Can i even get rid of it?

Potential Bold Solution I was thinking of training the designers by using teleconferencing and remote desktop to use Visual Studio and TFS, and how to deploy and build WSP solutions. This is usually a big nono since visual studio is designed for developers and not so much for designers. But i have faith in the designers that they can learn it. They have experiencing branding other CMS systems in the Java world. What do you think?

Answer 1

How about the idea that the two groups share the same repository and each can use their own code. So there is a single stream of development for shared files.

This does kind of assume that HTML is clearly separated from code. In that java world we'd have a JSP file that would contain specialised tags (which the designers should not touch) but need/should not contain Java code as such.