TFS Tools and Utilities – Part II : Email Subscription

TFS has a feature for sending email on various events to the subscribers. Users can subscribe for an limited events from the Team Explorer (The default events are quite frequently needed and should satisfy need for most of them). Following is how you can use email alert in TFS

• Open Team Explorer (Crtl+\, Ctrl+M)
• Right-click on the project for which you want to subscribe alerts and click on “Project Alerts…“
• By default there should be no subscription, as you can witness in the image below

• Now we will subscribe to the first event which is “My work items are changed by others”
• Click the Check  box to enable the alert
• Enter the email id where the alerts will be send. You can enter multiple email ids separated by “,”
• Now ask any of your colleague who has access to this project to enter any type of work item and have it assigned to you
• Once your colleague saves the WI you will get the email with subject “SharePoint.Samples Work Item Created: Task 123 – Test Task”

This will help you know what is changed/added, when and by whom? So you will not get surprise when your PM ask’s you “Did you finish the task assigned yesterday” as he thinks you know about it.

The bottleneck here is that every user(s) has to be trained on how to setup the project alerts. Most of the time the user is not aware of such feature and one person cannot setup alerts for others at least using the Team Explorer. Project alerts has to be setup for each project and cannot be setup to include all projects.

There is a tool which is and administrative tool to overcome this limitation of setting up alerts for other people. We can use this tool to setup alerts for other people. I have though used this only for setting up alerts for work items, this tool is capable of setting up alerts other than the ones you see in the project alert dialog box.

The tool is called “Team Foundation Server Event Subscription Tool” and can be downloaded here

Workaround for this