Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!

Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. What does this mean? TeamPlain application for free!

Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support. TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines. It also improves reach by enabling some access from non-Windows clients.

TeamPlain has been in the market for about a year now and has been very successful. Many of our VSTS customers use TeamPlain today and are very satisfied with it. Our advisory council and other customers have been telling us for the past year that we need a web UI for VSTS and that TeamPlain would be a great solution for us. We’ve listened, looked very closely at the product and concluded that they are right. Today is the culmination of a long process and the beginning of another.

TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access. Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here. It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL. Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via the DevBiz online forums.

Over the next few months, we will be rebranding TeamPlain as a Microsoft product and running it through our release process. When that is complete, we will be releasing it as a VSTS Power Tool, transitioning support to the Microsoft forums and beginning CSS (phone) support. In the Orcas timeframe, we will be releasing Team System Web Access as an official, documented, localized, and officially supported component of Team Foundation Server.