How do I subscribe a list of individuals to be alerted about the creation/change of a specific work item?

Question

Hello,

When creating a work item (i.e. defect), it is sometimes helpful if I can include multiple people to be alerted about the defect being created, as well as automatically receive e-mail anytime a change occurs to that defect.

I understand there are ways to create alerts for 'buckets' of defects (areas, or the result of queries), but this does not seem to scale well if I want a specific individual to follow one specific bug (short of creating a new alert for every single defect of interest to them, individually).

The user scenario I am looking to solve is this:

Joe opens up a new defect and assigns it to John.  Joe thinks that Mary would be interested in what happens to this bug, so puts her on a list of 'people to be notified'.

When the bug is saved, John and Mary both get e-mails about it. 

When ever the bug is modified, John and Mary gets e-mails about it.

John later thinks that David should also get e-mails about this bug, and adds him onto the list of people to be notified.

(and so on).

To those who use Bugzilla, this is similar to the 'CC list' option.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how this can be done?  (Please note: Am using TFS 2008).

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi AnilCa,

Thanks for your post.

You can do it by TFS Alert Editor, which is installed by TFS Power Tools. After install, you are able to view Alert Editor item in menu Team in Visual Studio.
(Before you using Alert Editor, please make sure that you have configured SMTP server and email notification setting well in TFS).

Here is a preview of Alert Editor: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/07/08/july-08-tfs-power-tool-preview.aspx

After you create a new work item, please follow the steps to create a new alert:
1. Team | Alert Editor
2. Click New to create an alert
3. Select Work Item Alerts | Specific Work Item changed
4. In Send To, select John and Mary
5. In Alert Definition, specify the ID or the defect
6. Later you can change the Send To field to add David to get notification

This should work when work item changing. But it doesn't work, when you create a new work item. Although TFS supports to notify when new work item is created, but it is more likely to meet rules like: notify Mary whenever John creates a work item. For your senario, it is not suitable.

TFS Web Access provides a better way for you to notify others when you create a new work item. You can directly send an email on the work item edit page. Please refer to the link: http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2007/08/27/enabling-email-functionality-in-team-system-web-access-tswa.aspx

Hope it helps.

Hongye Sun [MSFT]
MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum
If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg @ microsoft.com

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Answer 2

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, but this is not quite what I am looking for.  Although, this approach does work, it does add a lot of 'overhead' in two respects:

1) A lot of manual steps to do, each time you want to add a person (imagine 10 bugs a day)

2) The list of 'alerts' a person ends up collecting can be huge (if I am CCed on 1000 bugs in our database, I'll have been subscribed to 1000 alerts).  That becomes difficult to manage (find my real generic alerts, versus bug specific alerts).  And I'm curious how many alerts TFS supports.


With regard to the TFS Web Access approach: This looks interesting, but does not seem to address the problem.  Yes, the individual now receives e-mail about it, but then they have to go through many steps to subscribe to follow in on this bug.

Any other suggestions?

Answer 3

Sorry for my delayed reply.

I don't know any known method to resolve this problem, but I think you concern is reasonable.

One possible solution, that I can think of, is to add a new field to let user to select multiple people. (Multi select control is not supported yet. You have to use custom control like this one.)

Implement a web service which subscribe all work item creation and change events. The service will check the new field and find out the interested people. Then send email programatically.

Here are some references:
Subscribe TFS event to call web service:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507647.aspx

TFS will pass the work item id to the webservice. You can get work item data programatically:
http://blogs.msdn.com/briancombs/archive/2006/09/19/762210.aspx

Finally, I would recommend you to submit your feedback to http://connect.microsoft.com. So product group will consider this business senario in the future releases.

Have a nice day.

Hongye Sun [MSFT]
MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum
If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg @ microsoft.com

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Answer 4

Hi AnilCa,

Do you have any comment or feedback on this issue? We will be happy to hear from you.

Thanks,

 

Hongye Sun [MSFT]
MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum
If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg @ microsoft.com

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.
Welcome to the All-In-One Code Framework! If you have any feedback, please tell us.