Friday, June 13, 2014

Customer Feedback Portal for Team Foundation Server

As many users of Team Foundation Server know, Microsoft has recently introduced a way to collect Customer Feedback directly through TFS.

However, one of the major problems with this Customer Feedback mechanism is that it requires the customers to have Active Directory accounts on your Domain in order to send them an e-mail to capture their feedback.

Of course, if you are a reasonably large company, this is definitely not appealing to have to create Active Directory accounts for all of your customers (which may end up being hundreds of users per customers).

Needless to say, an alternative to having to do this in order to capture Customer Feedback is preferred.

Fortunately, Telerik TeamPulse has such as solution!  http://www.telerik.com/teampulse/features/ideas-and-feedback-portal

It provides the ability for customers to self-register and submit issues and feedback on your company's products all without requiring Active Directory accounts for your customers on TFS!

Unfortunately, if you look at the pricing for Telerik TeamPulse, this can get very pricey if  you plan on using TeamPulse internally as well: http://www.telerik.com/purchase/teampulse

Interestingly enough, when Microsoft originally acquired TeamPlain, TeamPlain already had a Customer Feedback portal that integrated with TFS!!!  For some strange reason, however, Microsoft NEVER EVER released this functionality to its customer base!!

Therefore, if you are like me and would prefer that Microsoft release their own version of a Customer Feedback portal, you can vote for this UserVoice item here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/5610595-provide-a-customer-feedback-item-tracking-web-port


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