[#VSONLINE] VSOnline available for everyone (or almost, is now free to Stakeholders ;)

Hello!

A couple of days ago someone asked me if I knew a good tool to manage backlogs, or to work together online. VSOnline is the official answer, although of course, the limitation of 5 users in free mode pulls back more than one.

And the problem is that when you talk about a team of 5 devs, the concept of team is much larger. In the next layer of interaction are often the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), customer people (which don’t have to be Product Owner), and some other people interested to see the progress of the project. These are just 3 examples in each case that there are variants of course. And the issue is that often makes no sense incorporate a license “full” of VSOnline for these people, since their interaction is limited. (aprox $20 per month)

The Visual Studio Team has decided to call them Stakeholders. And in addition has decided that they can use VSOnline for free. If you read well, VSOnline is free to the following actions

Full read/write/create on all work items
Create, run and save (“My Queries” to) work item queries
View project and team home pages
Access to the backlog, including add and update (but not ability to reprioritize the work)
Ability to receive work item alerts

And the following actions are excluded

No access to Code, Build or Test hubs.
No access to Team Rooms
No access to any administrative functionality (Team membership, license administration, permissions, configuration area/iterations, sprint home page creation, configuration, configuration of shared queries, etc.)

Note: I left the original text to not incur bad interpretations.

With respect to the availability of this licensing model, according to Brian Harry need to think in mid-August.

So now you know, VSOnline userland “codeless” is free Open-mouthed smile