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MSDN Universal Gets Team Foundation Server 2005!!!

I just got this from Tim Heuer, the MS Developer Evangelist for Phoenix, and I thought I'd pass it along directly. It is really big news, IMO. Any emphasis is mine.

It is not often that we receive direct communication to the community from Corporate VP's at the big ship... but yesterday we received one that contains great news regarding a situation of MS listening to the feedback of the community and reacting.  Below are excerpts from a memo from Sanjay Parthasarathy (affectionately called "Sanjay P"), who is the Corporate VP of .NET strategy (translation: "the man").

<SanjayP_excerpts>
We announced our product line and pricing in March, significantly ahead of product availability. What we heard from customers time and again was that they wanted Microsoft to provide as much advance notice as possible regarding product changes. Since the March announcement, we have received quite a bit of feedback about the SKU strategy, pricing and licensing.

[You]  have been an invaluable source of input on these topics and we are taking action to respond to many of your suggestions.

We will place a limited version of Team Foundation Server in each edition of the Visual Studio Team System family (Architects, Developers and Testers). This version will be restricted to a maximum of five users and should serve the needs of smaller organizations. Teams that have a need for more users should still find that Team Foundation Server is significantly more cost effective than current source code control solutions and offers tremendous value through its role as the core of integration across all of the Team System.

To address the broader feedback on pricing, we have also finalized promotional pricing around Team Suite to enable current subscribers to more easily upgrade to the full Visual Studio product line. Going forward into 2005, MSDN Universal customers will have three choices:

» Universal subscribers that want all of the client functionality of Team System will be able to upgrade to Team Suite by paying just the incremental software assurance or renewal price for the duration of their agreement. In retail, this amounts to around $2,300 and for most customers this represents a 75% or more discount on the full price of Team Suite. Volume customers will, of course, pay less.

» Universal subscribers who want Team Edition for Software Architects, Team Edition for Software Developers, or Team Edition for Software Testers will be able to upgrade at no additional cost. Each of these "role Editions" includes the MSDN Premium Subscription.

» Universal subscribers who want the 2005 equivalent of MSDN Universal can simply choose Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription and get the functional equivalent of MSDN Universal for about 15% less than what they paid today.

</SanjayP_excerpts>

And people say Microsoft doesn't pay attention to feedback! This is great news for small .NET shops who want to develop like the pros. Now there's more reason than ever to join the Empower program for ISVs (if you're an ISV, of course).

Posted: May 12 2005, 04:07 PM by interscape | with 17 comment(s)

Comments

SBC said:

this is terrific news!
thanks..
# May 12, 2005 3:00 PM

Jason Gaylord said:

I had one of our reps check with MS about this and it seems as though you can get the new MSDN Premium with Team Foundation Server 2005 for around $1500 a year on a 3 year open license if you already have MSDN Universal.
# May 12, 2005 3:18 PM

JuanBarbatos said:

Thats great news. It sounds like MS fixed half of the problem. It seems like a lot of people were also complaining about the "role editions" as well though. A lot of consultants will fit under all 3 "roles" and thus need all 3 subcriptions?
# May 12, 2005 3:21 PM

TrackBack said:

Microsoft, listening to customer feedback, says it will include a limited version (5 users) of the Team Foundation Server in the MSDN Universal subscription.
# May 12, 2005 4:26 PM

M. Keith Warren said:

I agree with Juan, there needs to be more clear definition of the product lines for people who are consultants/microISVs
# May 12, 2005 5:34 PM

i/Noodle said:

Yeah, it would be nice to be able to load test the apps I develop without having to buy the 'test' edition too.
# May 12, 2005 6:20 PM

James Crowley said:

Good news! Nice to know MS still take at least some of our comments seriously :D
# May 12, 2005 6:49 PM

Cyriel said:

Too bad they didn't do anything about the three different editions (yet). For small shops and consultants this still isn't interesting and i think lots of people are still considering to move to Visual Studio 2005 Pro in combination with Subversion, AnkhSVN, Cruisecontrol, Nant and Nunit instead (and yes, i'm one of them).

So guess it's time to start the "drop the three different hats" campaign because it looks like the "we want a lite version of team foundation server" campaign has now been succesfully completed :)

# May 13, 2005 3:26 AM

TrackBack said:

Awesome news that I just read over on Robert McLaws'
blog: each of the Visual Studio Team System editions...
# May 13, 2005 7:05 AM

css said:

Next we need to get the Code Profiling, Static Analysis, Unit Testing, Code Coverage into Visual Studio 2005 Professional with MSDN Premium Subscription. See below:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/subscriptions/compare/
Spread the word. Maybe we'll luck out again. If Microsoft is serious about letting developers create better software, they will bundle those tools with the lower subscription levels.
# May 13, 2005 6:33 PM

TrackBack said:

# May 14, 2005 2:30 AM

Prashant Sridharan said:

The role SKUs will definitely stay intact. In fact, our future plans call for adding more role SKUs over time. If you want everything in Visual Studio Team System, that's the Team Suite product (it's a hard bundle, meaning there is one setup and it installs everything). Getting into Team Suite starts at a $2300 upgrade price in retail, with that amount dropping as you get into higher volume.

$2300 may seem like a lot, but price our load testing tools against those from our competitors. In almost all cases, you'll see that Microsoft's load testing tools are 50-200% less expensive. And, I'm confident that our load testing tools are quite comparable for Web and Web services testing. You're going to be the judge, of course...

Let me also reiterate that Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription is a PURE SUPERSET of MSDN Universal today, and it's $500 less expensive in 2005. Don't discount what we've done in the "core" Pro product...in an ordinary year, the work on ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Forms, programming languages, mobile development, data tools, and so on would be a much lauded and major, major release in and of itself. All of that is now $500 less expensive than it used to be.

In the next version, we very well may push unit testing into the Pro box. The other features will likely stay in the Team Edition for Software Developers. We're also exploring what it means to put the *security* portion of those code analysis tools in Pro. Again, we're exploring all those things now, but for a future version. VS05 itself is on an end game trajectory.

You have to understand that these features were never designed to be decoupled in a mix and match type manner. If you look at all the other lifecycle tools on the market, they all suffer from the same fatal flaw: different user interfaces, different workflow models, different data models, etc. The end result is that these tools actually create communication barriers since you end up having to do a lot of "translation" from one product to another, one user to another, one project to another, etc. With Team System, we always said we would sacrifice features in favor of integration. In the end, I think we were able to get the features we wanted AND the integration we knew was necessary.

I'll also add that to look to the future, you need only look to our past history. As we progress over time with future versions, advanced features typically find their way into the lower end products, with "new" advanced features taking their place at the high end. Without getting specific, I think it's safe to assume that trend will continue over time.
# May 15, 2005 12:10 AM

Steve Luzynski said:

Please, please, PLEASE, put the security code analysis features in all editions. If there's anything that is needed on the Windows platform it is more attention to security minded coding.

If there's any way you can squeeze it into the standalone language products (the $110 ones that don't have the word "Team" in them anywhere) the functionality should be there too.
# May 15, 2005 7:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# May 16, 2005 12:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# May 16, 2005 5:27 AM

Dan L said:

Good idea, Steve L. As an SA to Microsoft from 2003-2005, I believe this would be a very important thing as well...a focus on security on the developer end.
# May 17, 2005 6:13 PM

TrackBack said:

It’s sad. It’s depressing really, that some prophecies have the ability to be self fulfilling if people...
# June 9, 2005 2:03 PM