I have a TFS server that has been moved between multiple physical servers and upgraded throughout versions 2005 -> 2015 during the past 10 years. It was working under a domain controller, but now its standing alone. When managing security and working with work items, it become like a mess. Too many old users are showing, some of them are duplicated with old names. However, we are dealing with windows users, so many of these users doesn't exists anymore. TFS web portal is showing a list of all existing users, but it doesn't offer delete option.
How can I delete them (old users)?
Is it the right procedure to follow (I
believe it won't be worst, as when I open work item owned by old
user, TFS shows the old name, but give a warning that this user
doesn't exists anymore)
I cannot confirm this solution will work.
From I could gather on Internet you need to delete user from all groups/collection they belonged to and then delete their windows account.
Overall
Delete from groups
Link to kick off TFS active sync.
Another solution could be using this software if it works with tfs 2015 or getting only important part of its source code from here
Related
I'm trying to move a Team Project from one Team Collection to another, including check-in history, user stories and source code.
I'm running a TFS 2015 Update 3 setup, but the tools I found do not support this version.
Tools:
http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eb77e739-c98c-4e36-9ead-fa115b27fefe
0. Create an empty collection that will be used as a copy of DefaultCollection.
I called my second collection "TeamPrjectCollection"
1. Make a Full Backup in TFS Administration Console
2. Detach the collection that contains your Team Project
3. Back up the collection database only using SQL Management Studio.
4. Restore database from backup to your empty collection
Restore DefaultCollection from backup file into the empty Collection called "TeamPrjectCollection". You might get an error message during restore, make sure to open Options tab and check "Overwrite the existing database" and "Close existing connections to destination database".
If you still get access error try do get DB offline restart the server and then back online the DB.
5. Attach both collections in TFS Administration Console
Select Tfs_DefaultDatabase DBs from the list and attach it, then select Tfs_TeamProjectCollection and attach it too with different Collection Name. Ignore the warning at the end.
6. Sort your Team Projects in both collections
After your attach process second collection will go offline due to the warning message saying that your both team projects exist in both collections.
Simply remove MyFirstProject from 'TeamProject Collection'
and remove 'TeamProjectToMigrate' from 'DefaultCollection'
Bring 'TeamProjectCollection' online.
As can see both Collections are accessible from TFS
For more details please refer to Visual Studio documentation here: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/setup-admin/tfs/admin/move-project-collection
As #Daniel mentioned in comment, there's no way to move team projects between collections other than by using third party tools. But this feature is under planned, you can track this UserVoice:
We are committed to allow you to move team projects between
collections, although it’s currently not in scope for the 2016
calendar year. We’ll provide an updated timeline as we get closer to
2017.
I am currently trying to solve an issue with our current on-premise TFS 2010 Server where I have 2 collections and both of my project collections were set to offline due to some tinkering with trying to upgrade to on-premise TFS 2015.
Whenever I try to activate the desired collection, I am getting the following error:
TF253021:The following team project is duplicated in at least two team
project collections: ProjectName. The collection cannot start while
the duplication exists. You must delete this project from all but one
of the collections before the collection can be started. The project
exists in the following collections: CollectionA, CollectionB.
I also had a look at each of their settings, and apparently the database connection string for both collections are pointing towards the same SQL Server instance and the same database. Both collections also have the same number and names of all team projects too.
I'm thinking of deleting one of the collection and its projects, but I fear that if I do it, it may delete the same collection and settings for the second project collection that I'm trying to set online.
I'm wondering if anybody has encountered this issue and what steps have he/she has done to fix it.
Many thanks!
You've gotten yourself in a remarkable situation, which may need Microsoft support to chime in. Even with creative backups I'd be unsure whether you'd get yourself in an unsupported end-situation.
If you have a backup of the whole situation before you started this experiment, I'd recommend going back to that.
You may find yourself in a catch-22 situation, since TFS 2010 has passed it's support lifecycle. Mentioning it happened while preparing for a TFS 2015 upgrade may convince them.
You can find the contact details here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/
I have a TFS 2015 installation where we have a rather big number of projects. Currently there are old projects, that aren't used anymore but need to stay available as an archive (read only).
I'd like to make a workspace or something in TFS so that these projects normally don't come up in the normal view.
One way I found out is to set the TFS offline, make a copy of the database, bring the copy of the database online and then delete all projects that are still active and rename it. After that bring back online the original database and delete all archived projects.
This can be done once. Maybe once a year, but it will result in a large number of databases. This will make it worse than leaving the inactive projects in the workspace.
Does anyone have better idea? Or: What do you do with old projects?
First, there currently is no archiving function on TFS. However you can use something else as a workaround. To do this, you can either create a project designated as archived that you then have to assign permissions to and so on or move the project into another collection using the TFS Integration Toolkit.
Set the Read permission to Deny of contributor group will hidden the collection to come up in the normal view.
Below are some related blogs for your reference:
How to: Archive Team Foundation Server Team Projects
completely archive a TFS2012 project
Moreover, there has been a feature request in UserVoice, you can also vote up it to get more attention.
The process you are using (cloning a collection) would be the only method to achieve an archive as you describe it.
I would start by understanding why you have so many projects! Prefer larger Team Projects that contain many Products, Projects, Teams that are easier to manage.
Last week I upgraded our TFS 2012 Server to TFS 2013. I read the MSDN documentation first and I also followed the documentation as I performed the upgrade. Everything seemed to go ok.
After the upgrade I ended up with 7 or so Team Projects that the wizard couldn't configure, for whatever reason, and needed manual configuration.
I noticed this week that ALL of the work items under one of my Team Projects are missing. Gone. Like even if I select Team|Go To Work Item and enter in a known Work Item Id, I receive an error that the item is either missing or I do not have permission to view it. I'm an Administrator on the TFS server and I'm the TFS Admin, so I highly doubt permissions are the issue.
I remoted into the server and launched SSMS to explore the raw data. I know for a fact Work Item 450 is missing (it's the only Id I remember at this point). I selected the TOP 1000 from WorkItemsAre, which seems to be the table that holds the Work Items (?). There is a gap in the Ids, I see 1-448, then the numbering picks up again at 457. So, somehow my Work Items appear to have been deleted. I stopped there, I assume there are more gaps since I'm missing more than 9 items.
Now I haven't gone through every one of our Team Projects. I've only touched 3 of them since the upgrade. Thankfully the largest, most active Team Project, with the most work items/version history seems to be intact. I'm not sure if any other Team Projects are missing their Work Items too.
Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know if there's some "secret squirrel" way to recover these missing work items, or have they been hard deleted and are gone for good (other than looking through tape backups of the server).
Any advice would be appreciated.
I already migrated to TFS 2013 from TFS 2012.
The problem of manual configuring the project may occur when you have customized work item types in TFS Project Templates. Did you customize your project templates?
Although, I can hardly believe that work-items getting hard deleted from TFS. This issue may occur probably because of archiving during migration. The workitems that TFS upgrade wizard may not have "understood" during migration/upgrade, might be archived and moved to another table in database Tfs_DefaultCollection.
You may want to consider that. I am not sure if that may be the case, but this happened when we migrated from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 because we had many custom work items in TFS 2010. Hence we had to standardize templates before migration using powershell. But we lost some amount of history.
Hope that sparks some idea.
We're starting to user Team Foundation Server and my boss would like some way to "archive" projects. Meaning after they are completed, remove them from an "active" state so that only "active" projects are visible.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
I've thought of 2 options.
1) Create 2 base projects. 1 for active projects and 1 for achived projects
2) Remove all users from the archived projects.
Thanks,
Sam
I would personally recommend waiting for TFS 2010 when more functionality will be introduced that will assist you in the ability to "archive" Team Projects.
In TFS 2010 you will hopefully be able to move a team project to a new Team Project Collection. Actually you do this by duplicating your "active" project collection and then deleting all the team projects from it apart from the one that you want archived. In this active project collection, delete the archived project that you have a copy of in the duplicated project collection. This archived team project will then live in it's own project collection which means it has it's own database etc which can be easily backed up / archived etc.
The archived team project project collection can then be left as it is as it doesn't slow down the server any if not being used - or it could even be detached from the TFS Application instance so that it doesn't show up at all and re-attached at any time.
An advantage of using project collections in TFS 2010 is that full Version Control and Work Item Tracking history will be maintained.
I would use it just as you normally do, but when you are done with the project then you remove it from the visible list. (In Visual Studio you can right click on a project in the team explorer and say remove.)
If you are worried about changes after the project is done, then remove the users from the contributors list. If you really want to boot the users out (so they cannot even see it) then you can deny them rights to the project.
This way you don't have to see it, but you can keep all your projects on the base level.
I would NOT recommend having just 2 base project for active and in-active. A TFS project should not be based on a state.
We created an "Archive" team project and we regularly move unused source code to that team project. It has worked out well for us, the history is preserved so we can always reference the archive project for old code or information on past changes. We also limit access such that developers have read access but only TFS administrators have write access. I haven't checked to see how these moves impact the association of check-ins with work items - mostly because everything we archived was checked in before we moved to TFS.
As for the one active team project, I was led to believe by knowledge experts and online documentation that this wasn't the best way to organize team projects. I think ideally you group projects/solutions together into a single team project if they are related (i.e. by line of business or dependencies).
I'm sure you've already done your research, but there is plenty of documentation out there that might assist (especially if your team maintains a single application or a handful of applications). I would suggest starting with patterns & practices: Team Development with TFS.