Integrating Visual Studio Team Services with Microsoft Teams

January 17th, 2017

In this post, Senior Awarding Development Manager, Mike Bolser demonstrates how to integrate Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio Team Services.

Microsoft Teams the new chat-based workspace in Office365 offers several services to enable work group collaboration. Ane way of enabling work group collaboration for developers is through a built-in integration with Visual Studio Squad Services. Microsoft Teams paired with Visual Studio Team Services provides a comprehensive chat and collaboration experience across your Active and development work.

Some of the features that enable this tight integration can allow developers to stay up to date with alerts for work items, pull requests, commits, and builds. This functionality is enabled through a connector inside the Microsoft Teams service. Each Connector event is its own conversation, allowing users to exist notified of events they intendance near and discuss them with their team members.

In a sample projection, Wild fauna Reporter, we created a new Microsoft Squad and added iii channels named "General", "Build Notifications" and "Features and Stories" as shown beneath:

Calculation the Kanban boards for Feature and Stories is merely as simple. With the channel selected, click on the "+" icon at the top-right of the conversation pane and select Team Services.

Squad Services will prompt you to authenticate and select the squad project you desire to connect to. You can besides add dissimilar boards to the same channel; in this instance, nosotros can choose to add both the Feature and Story boards which are displayed every bit carve up tabs.

From this view you lot continue to collaborate with Team Services just as you would through the web interface adding and updating items and tasks in a rich user interface. Additional data values tin exist updated by opening each item for a total rich editing experience.

For proactive project alerts, nosotros can add Team Service events to any aqueduct within Microsoft Teams. Equally an example, nosotros can add build events for this project to the channel named "Build Notifications". From Microsoft Teams, simply right-clicked on the desired channel and selected "Connectors".

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Microsoft Teams will nowadays a series of connectors built to enable a multifariousness of DevOps systems to communicate within your team channel. From the listing of connectors, we select the "Visual Studio Team Services" item shown in the list below by clicking the "Add together" push button.

Microsoft Teams will ask you to select the Team Services account you lot would similar to use, team projection and outcome blazon to receive notifications for. Depending on the type of event selected, you may also refine the issue notification to a specific build or release definition, piece of work item path or source code area.

Microsoft Teams also supports multiple event notifications to be connected to a unmarried squad channel. Just revisit the "Connectors" correct-click option and select the "Visual Studio Team Services" item to add together additional events to this channel.

One time an event occurs, a notification will appear in your team aqueduct assuasive quick and easy access to the supporting details within Team Services. Nosotros can also reply to these notifications to have team conversations about the events.

Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio Team Services integration is a corking productivity tool that all teams should investigate and consider integrating within their development environments. Motion these conversations out of traditional email and into your DevOps process for increased collaboration and visibility.

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Developer Support App Dev Customer Success Account Manager, Microsoft Developer Support