Sharing Team Project Resources
You cannot share team project-specific settings, objects, and process templates directly across team projects. The process templates, version control settings, check-in policies, build types, work item definitions, and more for each team project are architecturally isolated from those of another team project and cannot be used in another team project. The only exception to this rule is the team members themselves: a team member can be a member of more than one group or team project at the same time.
Although Team Foundation Server does not support Visual SourceSafe-style sharing, and so items under version control cannot be shared within or across team projects, there are ways of indirectly sharing the process template, process guidance, information, and work flow across team projects.
Process Template
To share the same process template across team projects, store the process template on the Team Foundation Server and use it every time that you create a new team project. For more information about uploading the process template to the Team Foundation Server, see Process Template Manager.
Process Guidance
To share the same process guidance across team projects, store the process guidance documentation in a common location outside an individual team project. This location could be a network share, a team site in Windows SharePoint or Microsoft Project Server, or anywhere available by a team member's Web browser. If you share the process guidance documentation outside the individual team project, you must redirect the links from Visual Studio and from Team Explorer to point to the new location. The links that have to be updated include the following:
On the Visual Studio Help menu, the Team Project Process Guidance command.
In Team Explorer, the Team Project Process Guidance command on the shortcut menu of the Work Items node.
In Team Explorer, the Team Project Process Guidance command on the shortcut menu of work item form.
For more information about how to change the links from Visual Studio to the process guidance, see Customizing Process Templates.
Team Project Items
To use the same content or structure of team project items, such as source code, that are stored and managed in the source control tree, you can either:
Branch the source control tree to create the same directory structure and contents in the target team project, or
Copy the item manually from the source team project to the target team project.
To use the same content or structure of work items, documents, reports, builds, tests, or source code that are not stored in the source control tree, you can copy the item from the source team project to the target team project. Although a dynamic relationship does not exist between the source and the target; that is, changing one will not change the other; the information that is contained in the items in one team project can be available in other team projects.
Status and Other Information
You can query work items across team projects as a tool for managing more than one team project at a time or rolling up information across team projects.
See Also
Tasks
How to: Copy a Work Item
How to: Upload a Document in Team Explorer
How to: Get the Source for your Team Project