Access a Team Project Portal and Process Guidance

Article
02/04/2013

You can access your team project portal to upload and view shared documents, reports, dashboards, and other information that relates to a specific team project. You can also access process guidance to understand how to manage types of work items that your team uses.

The process template that was used to create your team project determines the artifacts and the process guidance that are available for your team project. For information about the artifacts that are defined for the process template for MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0, see Artifacts (Agile).

Note

If your team project does not have a project portal enabled, you cannot access some artifacts, such as dashboards, Office Excel reports, and workbooks for that project.

In this topic

Determining If Your Team Project Portal is Enabled
Determining If Process Guidance is Enabled
Accessing Team Project Portal Sites
Accessing Process Guidance

If your team project has a project portal and process guidance documents, you can access them by using the procedures in this topic. If you have problems accessing either the project sites or process guidance documents, contact your Team Foundation Server administrator or your team project administrator to make sure that your user account has the permissions described in the following section.

Required Permissions

To perform these procedures, you must be a member of the Team Foundation Valid Users security group. If the necessary security permissions are set explicitly, you must have your View project-level information permission on the team project set to Allow. You must also be a member of the Windows SharePoint Services Reader security group. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

Determining Whether Your Team Project Portal is Enabled

The project portal is a site configured by using SharePoint Products that is created when the team project is created or it is added later. The project portal is the central location for you to view the status of the team project and to access dashboards, Office Excel reports, and other artifacts that are shared with team members.

If you cannot access Office Excel reports or dashboards, you might want to verify whether a portal is enabled for your team project.

To determine whether your team project portal is enabled

In Visual Studio, open the Team menu, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Portal Settings.

The Project Portal Settings dialog box opens.

If the Enable team project portal check box is selected, your team project portal is enabled. If it is not and you want to enable a portal, contact your system administrator. For more information, see Add a Team Project Portal.

Determining Whether Process Guidance is Enabled

Process guidance provides information about how to coordinate work on a team project, and how to use a type of work item in the overall project life cycle. Process guidance can provide details about a team project, such as how to complete work item fields, examples of healthy and unhealthy reports, query descriptions, roles to assume, activities to complete, and other information.

Some process guidance links will work only if process guidance has been enabled for your team project.

To determine if process guidance is enabled

In Visual Studio, open the Team menu, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Portal Settings.

The Project Portal Settings dialog box opens.
Click the Process Guidance tab.

If the Enable the link to process guidance check box is checked, process guidance is enabled.

If the check box is not selected and you want to enable process guidance, see Share Process Guidance for a Team Project.

Accessing Team Project Portal Sites

The project portal is a site that is created by using SharePoint Products when the team project is created or the site is added later. The project portal is the central location for you to view the status of the team project and to access dashboards, Excel reports, and other artifacts that are shared with team members.

To view the project portal from Team Web Access

In Team Web Access, on the Home page, click Project Portal.

To view the project portal from Team Explorer

In Team Explorer, right-click the team project node, and then click Show Project Portal.
View the project portal home page.
Locate other parts of the project portal by using either the portal menu bar or the Quick Launch links.

To view the project portal from Internet Explorer

Open a browser window and type the address where your project portal has been configured.

Note

The team project portal can be located on any server that runs SharePoint Products.

To determine the URL for your project portal, open the Project Portal Settings dialog box as described earlier in this topic.

Accessing Process Guidance

To access process guidance from Team Web Access

In Team Web Access, on the Home page, click Process Guidance.

In Visual Studio, on the Help menu, click Team Project Process Guidance.

To access process guidance for all work items

In Team Explorer, right-click the Work Items node, and then click Team Project Process Guidance.
On the process guidance work items index page, click the name of the work item.

To access process guidance for a type of work item

In Team Explorer, open a work item.
Click .

If available, process guidance for the type of work item appears.

To access process guidance from Office Excel or Office Project

In Office Excel or Office Project, click Help, and then click Team Project Process Guidance.

The process guidance associated with the current work item list opens in your Web browser.

Note

You must be connected to Team Foundation Server and a team project for the command to be active.