Ok, so TechEd 2005 was fun and exhausting - there were a couple of things mentioned in sessions that are VERY cool and important.
1. Pricing sounds like it's changing again. There was a Cabana talk on Monday where they covered the pricing strategy, and the new thing for me was that they mentioned that if you are an MSDN-U subscriber and want Team Suite, it will only be $1000 more per year (retail price), as opposed to the $2299 previously stated. I looked a bit on the pricing website and haven't been able to find this in print yet - so maybe it's not fully baked.
2. Microsoft will write a provider to allow Visual Studio 2003 and VB6/VC6 to access the new Team Foundation Version Control system. People have been asking for this repeatedly, and Microsoft has listened. I have to give kudos to Microsoft for this, I've never watched a product release as closely as I'm watching this one, and I can honestly say that Microsoft is listening to customer feedback and using that to strengthen their offering.
3. Partner stories - I talked to several partners that are integrating with Team System. Here's my eval based on what I saw/heard:
- SourceGear has the best story with their Allerton product which I saw a couple of demos of hitting Team Foundation Version Control from Eclipse/Linux. There are a lot of companies with both J2EE and .NET developers, and this will help them both be on the same platform. I've had many customers ask me about getting their Java developers on Team Foundation, so it will be nice to have an answer for that desire.
- Rational - I went by their booth, and they have no plans to integrate at all with Team System. The top two questions I get from people about Rational products and Team system are: "Can I keep Clearcase?" and "Does Robot integrate?" The answer to both is "no". I assumed this would be the case, but it's nice to have a real answer to give people now, rather than just saying "you'll have to ask Rational." I understand why they aren't supporting VSTS, and I see a future where J2EE developers are using Rational/Borland products and .NET developers are using VSTS. If Rational doesn't get their pricing down, it's going to drive J2EE developers to .NET simply based on cost.
- Borland - much has been made of their CaliberRM product, as it was announced to have planned support for Team System back at TechEd 2004! I must say that after talking to their reps, I was unimpressed. It sounds like the integration will be minimal (mainly 1-way creation of work items, so that as requirements change, things don't integrate further.)
- Mercury - On the testing side of development, Mercury Interactive is a huge player with Test Director, WinRunner and LoadRunner. The only stated integration they have planned right now is that they will synchronize with work items behind the scenes. Mercury wants you using their products for all of your testing and then syncing those up with Team System's work items. While this makes sense from a business standpoint, it's not what I think most people will want. What I want them to do is allow me to run their tests (mainly WinRunner) from the testing framework in VSTE/ST (Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers). Obviously, this make their product little more than a plug-in, so that's not a compelling thing for them to do. Apparently they are still "considering" this, it will be interesting to see if the story changes.
- Compuware - I didn't get a chance to talk to Compuware, but one of my coworkers did, and they seemed to "get it". It sounds like they looked at Team System, looked their own products and determined where they had more to offer than Team System does. They then targeted close integration. Compuware has an function UI testing tool (the type that record mouse clicks, etc.). They are making it so that you can call those test from Team System and report the results to Team Foundation. Assuming they get that working, I'm going to be advocating people ditch Rational/Mercury for UI testing and consider their product.
- AutomatedQA - I didn't talk to these guys either, they seem to have the same story as Compuware. I'm going to try and take a look at their product (and Compuware's) in the coming months to see which I like best, so I have a some direction to point my customers. Automated UI testing is important to people, and Team System doesn't have it, it's a great gap to fill.
In unrelated news - we had a moderate amount of traffic at our booth (Notion Solutions). Our big emphasis at TechEd was Team System training and mentoring. It was interesting to see how many people had a genuine interest in learning more. We have scheduled a public Team System class for the first week of July in Dallas, I'm curious to see how much follow-up interest there is in that class. We're also doing ASP.NET 2.0 classes, but did a really bad job of talking about any of the public classes @ TechEd. I still think the right way to adopt Team System is on-site training, but so far we've only been teaching people who are "exploring" Team System, and public, overview training works great for that.
For those of you that came by our booth, or ran into us at the Cabana - it was great meeting you - hope to see you at PDC!