Share information using the project portal

Teams use project portals to share information and support how their team works. If you install TFS with a configuration that includes SharePoint Products and you created a project portal when you created your team project, your team project is configured with a SharePoint site for the project portal.

Open the project portal

1. From Team Explorer, open the documents page.

   If you don’t see the documents icon, your team project is not configured with a SharePoint site. To learn how to configure a SharePoint site for your team project, go here.

2. Show the project portal.

   

   From Team Web Access (TWA), choose the Go to project portal from the home page.

   The link opens to the Project, Progress, or Release dashboard, depending on your SharePoint site configuration and the process template used to create your team project.

   To learn more about dashboards, see Dashboards or Dashboards (CMMI).

   If you can’t open the portal, you need to be added to a permissions group in SharePoint.

Ways your team can share information using the project portal

Your team can use the SharePoint portal to share information in the following ways:

• Share data contained in reports or dashboards.

  The reports and dashboards that you’ll have access to depend on the process template created with your team project. For an overview of the artifacts available with the default process templates, see Scrum, Agile, and CMMI.

• Share team progress using predefined or customized dashboards.

  Dashboards provide information necessary to quickly understand the status of a team project. Because the project portal is composed of Web parts, you can create a customized version of it. Besides the standard information displayed on the project portal, you can add Web parts that connect to other data sources inside and outside the project. For more information about customizing the page layout or adding Web parts, choose Help on the project portal menu bar.

• Share documents, files, images.

  Teams can upload and organize documents into folders and subfolders.

• Share team knowledge and processes using the SharePoint wiki.

  See Manage a wiki.

• Reference process guidance for select team project artifacts.

  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 is hosted on MSDN for the Scrum, Agile, and CMMI process template artifacts.

Q & A

Q: What artifacts are available with a SharePoint project portal?

A: The artifacts you’ll have access to depend on the process template created with your team project. For an overview of the artifacts available with the default process templates, see Work with team project artifacts.

Q: How do I access process guidance?

A: If your team project is configured with a SharePoint site for its project portal, you can access process guidance from the work item forms in Team Explorer. Choose the process guidance icon or press F1. These links access information contained in the Documents Support folder.

From TWA, you can access process guidance from the home page.

When you choose the process guidance icon that appears in the work item forms in Team Explorer, a web browser opens and the page that’s defined in the process guidance support file for the corresponding work item type is displayed. If you have not configured your team project with a project portal, or you haven’t uploaded the process guidance support files to the project portal, then this link will be inactive.

You can redirect process guidance to your custom content.

Q: How do I add a project portal to my team project? How do I enable process guidance?

A: If you want to specify an existing website as your team project’s portal or support process guidance, see Configure a project portal.

Important

If you add another type of website, the links to open the project portal from TWA and Team Explorer don’t appear. Also, the Documents page doesn't appear in Team Explorer.

A: If you have a SharePoint site already configured with Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint, see Configure a project portal.

If you need to install a SharePoint product first, see Manually install SharePoint products for Team Foundation Server.

Q: Can I customize the process guidance?

A: Yes. See Configure or redirect process guidance.

Q: Do you want more information about SharePoint site features?

A: See the SharePoint Online Tutorial.