TeamCompanion 4 has been released

 

Ekobit just released TeamCompanion 4.0, teamcompanion is an outlook addin that allows you to interact with TFS without having to leave outlook.

It allows you to synchronize workitems with outlook so you can manage work items without having to leave it. It also makes a great bridge between work items and your email. You can send a work item by email, send a list of work items and create work items from a received email (if you want the email and attachments can automatically be attached to the workitem itself). It can intelligent detect when you receive a TFS notification by email (checkin event or build event) and with one click you can open the changeset or a build detail for easy inspection just like in Team Explorer.

You can also see TFS reports (and email them !!!! directly from outlook), not to mention it also integrates with sharepoint.

If you receive feature requests or bugs by email TeamCompanion is a great way of entering them directly into TFS without doing a lot of typing and copy & paste of files. It is also great if you want to email a list of tasks to be performed or to send a list of features that have been implemented in a given iteration/release.

Version 4 brings us a bunch of new features.

Offline support for work item, a faster storage mechanism for work items and a SUPER search that not only is fast as hell but is also very flexible. If you are into agile it also has a brand new agile planning capabilities which allows you to easily do your backlog planning and capacity planning for your team.

You can read a much better description than mine on Oggy’s announcement post which has the whole list of new features with lot of screenshots.

If you are someone who likes videos, there is also a bunch of videos available for viewing

I have been using TeamCompanion daily since v1 and I’ve also been using beta testing version 4 (and 3 and 2 ) and I must say the new features are great help to my daily work. Specially the search, which blows outlook search out in the water.

TeamCompanion is one of the tools that I recommend to anyone who needs to interact with TFS.

Disclosure: I own 2 licenses of Team Companion one of which has been offered to me by Ekobit so I could use TeamCompanion on my netbook.