subscribe via email to incoming tfs issues? - tfs

I'm wondering if there's a way to write a tfs query such that when the results change, I will receive an email notifying me.
side question - is there a way to subscribe to updates to specific pieces of code?
Thanks!

I have the TFS Power Tools installed. The Alerts Explorer appears to have pre-configured alerts for several check-in activities. One of them is Check-In of a specific file happens.
And, I'm not sure which results you're talking about, but... You can also create various alerts for Builds and Work Item actions. I've got mine set up to alert me when something is assigned to me or when something assigned to me changes.

Related

Is there a standard way to add some approval procedure/or at least notification for changes in task groups/builds/etc.?

We had a few cases when:
Someone changes a task group (or build/release/whatever).
Makes some mistake.
Then publishes/saves it.
But doesn't notify anyone that such changes were made.
Some hours later some dependent build breaks because of those changes.
And we have to spend even more time trying to find what and when has changed as it is not often that simple to find out with external task groups.
What we want to have:
Ideally - some approval process for such changes. Kind of like code review, but for task groups/builds.
If not - then at least some way to receive notifications about changes in task groups and etc. we are interested in?
I found neither, and, honestly, doubt that such features are present in the TFS version we use (TFS 2018.2), but perhaps I've missed something.
There isn't any workflow security or approval process for the groups. You could suggest that kind of feature on the developercommunity. Restrict access to edit Task Groups to only those who understand how to bump the Task Group version. That way at least you will keep backward compatibility across your builds unless that explicitly upgrade to that version.
There aren't any built in notifications, but you could create an automated process to send email notifications using PowerShell using the existing API.
Get the Id for the task group using the taskgroups list api
Use the revisions api to get the history _apis/distributedtask/taskgroups/{taskgroupid}/revisions
Send an update for anything that edited today

How to get tfs to notify affected developers of changes?

I'm on a small team and we are emailing each other when we make changes telling each other to get latest; pretty inefficient. And error prone.
How can we set up TFS to do this notify via email, perhaps with a change summary including the affected files?
You can use alerts in TFS to setup those notifications.

TFS 2013 (update 4) email alerts for team without contributor role

I'm on update 4. I want to let business users submit "tickets" in TFS for research. However, they less rights to the project and aren't part of the contributors role. In addition, TFS documention indicates that once you deploy a "team alert" that the "#ME" variable changes to actually referring to the team, and not the person.
What is the approach to take to ensure that someone with less permissions, and not part of contributor group, will always get notified when a work item they created gets changed.
NOTE: TFS 2013 UPDATE 4 -- ON PREMISE
Related item: TFS 2013 (Update 2) Team Alerts not sending emails
* this doesn't help as I can't add them as contributors, need narrowing security permission.
UPDATE 2016-02-22
In looking through the alerts section, as an admin I see I can actually search and find an individual and setup an alert for them on the workitem change. However, this is a manual process, and I would like to do this in bulk. I will work on tracing the query execution that is called when the alert is created and see if I could replicate with a sql command to insert alerts for all users. However, I'd like to avoid running a direct sql query to do this if possible, if there is some bulk processing functionality that allows an individual alert to be deployed to each person on a team without doing it manually.
Anyone aware of any extensions, scripts, or other functionality that does this?
According to the comments of this issue TFS 2013 Update 2 Team Alerts not sending emails.This issue is not fixed with TFS 2013 UPDATE4. So, if you can't add the users as contributors, then they can't receive an email.
As a workaround, you can use events of team room. Adding events lets your team know when builds finish, source code is checked in, work items are updated, and requests for code reviews occur. This can be visible to all members of the team room. Detailed steps and more info from MSDN Collaborate in a team room

Can TFS 2013 have email notications to multiple users that watch a work item

I'm looking to reproduce the Jira watch functionality in TFS 2013. In Jira, you can click a link to watch an item and thereafter you will be notified when anything on that item changes.
I know on TFS you can:
be emailed if anyone changes a bug you are assigned to
manually email a bug to anyone at any time
Create a custom report and pin it to your home page to notify yourself of things (like this maybe?)
I can imagine creating a new field that will accept multiple users and creating a custom email notification to notify everyone in that list if the work item changes. But that seem like a whole lot of work and I'm not sure were to start if that is the way do do this.
What's the easiest way to get functionality like watching a work item? If it's easy and similar to the Jira functionality that is better for me than exactly the same and hard to do.
Sure, you can setup email alerts based on many different criteria, including what you asked for.
You need to go to the Alerts section, and create a new custom alert, and you can put in the ID of whatever work item you want to "watch". By default it includes the clause AuthorizedAs <> [Me] which will make sure it doesn't email you for changes that you make, but you can remove that clause if you'd like.

Discussions and email notifications on TFS tasks

We're new to TFS and have some tasks set up in Team Explorer. It seems the History pane is the right/best place to add notes/discussions (although it's very different from other tools I'm used to like bugzilla, jira, redmine)?
But how can we set it up so interested parties get notified of new comments on a task, preferably by email? We're all making it up as we go along with no prior TFS experience but I'd hope my experience with other tools (the project hasn't used a proper issue tracker before) would help me figure things out but it all seems rather confusing.
If you install the TFS 2010 Power Tools (this is removed for 2012 as it's setup in the web interface according to this link although I've not played with this in 2012), under Team > Alerts Explorer you can add alerts for email notifications.
It's pretty simple, you can get alerts for when work items are modified, created under a certain path, assigned to you etc, they are basically configured in a similar way to the work item queries so it's quite easy to setup what you want.
They can be setup by any users, so you might want to let your users setup their own custom rules as they like, then you logon as a generic user (such as your admin user) to setup team specific queries, or else you might end up with users complaining about getting emails no longer relevent to them or need changing, when the user that set them up leaves/moves etc... Else you'll be hunting round to find who setup the original rules.

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