I was using Team foundation workgroup edition for the past year to manage collaborating with a couple of people. And the other stuff you use team foundation for.
I like Team foundation a lot but unfortunately am not rich enough to buy licenses for everybody that needs to log bugs etc. To avoid all those licensing issues we have switched over to a combination of open source packets.The total cost of the operation is about 450NZD for unlimited licenses.
So what is the setup :
- Subversion as source control server
- Apache2 with openSSL for people to connect to the subversion repository.
- TortoiseSVN and/or AnkhSVN (VS2k5 integration) as source control client
- Gemini as project management tool
- Gemini Time tracker to manage the time spent on issues/work items
- The plugin originally written by Chris Auld and improved by Frans Bouma for hooking into subversion
The whole experience took about 6 hours to configure ant that is because I didn’t know apache at all and getting it to work with SSL did take me some time until I found the install guide that had a link to compiled binaries. I’m not that good in compiling ansi-C on a windows 2k3 64-bit machine without the windows sdk installed. Not to mention all these little tools you have to download all over the place. Most of them i had never heard of before, so yes I was happy to find that guide.
We are now completely switched over, except for the work items that are currently in team foundation server. It was a good moment to do this because the most of the previous projects have come to an end and the new wave is rolling in. I got really tired of retyping the emails etc I got into the issue tracker, simply becasue I couldn’t afford it.
Interested to see people shifting off team foundation. I am developing on a very similar setup, except that we use Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) for issue tracking and SVN integration.
I had always wondered if team foundation was that much better, but I guess that cost is a considerable factor.