Accessing Team Foundation Server

Question

We have visual studio installed in our laptop for all our team members and we are planning to use version controls using Team Foundation Server. The TFS is installed in a different sever so I know that we can connect the TFS using VS but my question is does everyone in the team needs to have access to that server before they are start connecting the TFS? Thanks

Answer 1

To quickly answer your question: The users do not necessarily need direct access to the machine, but they do need a TFS Identity with the correct permissions to log in to TFS when prompted.

To answer your question in detail:

Think of TFS Administration in three layers:

1. TFS Administration
2. Team Project Collection Administration
3. Team Project Administration

To ensure that your users can access TFS source control you need all three correctly configured.

The first order of business is to ensure that the TFS application is talking to your domain controller (or aware of your local user accounts if you aren't using AD) while wearing your TFS Administrator hat. To quickly test this you can access your application tier and run tfsconfig identities. This will produce a list of all valid identities in TFS.

The second order of business is to ensure that your valid TFS users are [CollectionName]\Project Collection Valid Users. You can do this from the TFS Admin console wearing your TFS Administrator hat, or from Team Web Access wearing your TPC Admin hat. What I would expect to see as a member of this is a group called [ProjectName]\Project Valid Users

The third order of business is to ensure that your users are valid users in the Team Project. You can do this from the TFS Admin console again wearing your TFS Admin hat, or your can do it from Team Web Access wearing your Team Project admin hat. What I would expect to see as a member of this is a group called [ProjectName]\Team Name.

Within this team, you should see the individual identities from step one that you want to have access to the source code.

To summarize: Your users should be a member of a team (or multiple teams) nested under the Team Project. These teams should be members of the Project Valid Users group for the Team Project, which should be a member of the Project Collection Valid Users group for the collection.