Saved Queries

Description:

The client needed their customer-facing account managers to have access to the status of work orders that were being tracked in Team Foundation Server.

These account managers were not licensed users of TFS. The client sought an economical solution that would enable them to legally deliver the necessary information to account managers without having to pay a large amount of money for TFS licenses for these users.

Solution:

A recent change to the TFS End User License Agreement (EULA), allows users without a TFS license to access TFS data under specific circumstances. Non-licensed users are allowed to 1) Create TFS work items and 2) View and update TFS work items that they created.

In this case, however, the account managers needed to be able view the status of work items that were created by someone else. Giving them direct access to live TFS data would have required a license to be purchased for each of these users.

Fortunately, another provision of the TFS EULA allows users to view TFS data if there was a manual step involved in creating the data. For example, a licensed TFS user could run a query, print the query results, and then give the printout to a non-licensed user. Likewise, a licensed TFS user could save a query to an Excel file and then e-mail it to a non-licensed user. These scenarios are allow by the TFS EULA because there is a manual intervention step involved in the process.

While this precludes non-licensed users from viewing live TFS data, the account managers only needed access to data that had been updated within the last 24 hours.

To take advantage of this provision of the TFS EULA and meet the client's needs, we created a web-based application that allowed licensed TFS users to run TFS queries and then save them as named, dated queries on the server.

With this in place, non-licensed users could then visit the same web-based application and view these saved query results. Because the saved queries were the result of a manual step initiated by a TFS user, non-licensed users were legally allowed to view these previously saved query results.