TFS on Windows Azure

Big news if you following Microsoft PDC 2010 is that Mr TFS : Brian Harry did a demo on how they took TFS 2010 and modified it to run on Windows Azure.

This is obviously concerning from a competition point of view if you are hosting TFS, as Microsoft is most likely going to have TFS as an subscription service on Azure.

That aside, it is interesting to see the effort involved in “porting” a large scale application to Windows Azure and the caveats that you have to address to have something running successfully.

On the plus side they made some improvements to TFS itself, which makes more sense for it to run “in the cloud”. One of the major changes in my mind is that fact that they changed the Build Controller to have a client as opposed to a peer relationship.

I always hated the cyclical relationship between TFS and the Build Controllers. Working in distributed teams it was a mission setting up continuous integration and then with limited access to the TFS Build servers, we would either have to commute to the office to fix a build issue or, what tended to happen more often, you live with a broken build for a couple of weeks until someone went in to the office that could fix it.

I really hope that we will see these changes becoming available in the mainstream application.

Is competition bad?

 

Being a very young, niche service provider in South Africa, I’m very concerned about competition. I heard about a fairly well known American company doing TFS and Visual Studio consulting and training, busy establishing a presence in South Africa: you know that sinking sensation that a person gets?!

Not long after this I was speaking to Paul Hacker who hosts TFS, and noticed that there was yet another company that has just started hosting TFS in the States. I forwarded him the details and we got to chatting around the subject of competition.

Between our discussion and reflecting on my actions after I heard about the competition coming into this country, I have concluded that:

Competition is not always that bad.

Sure it gives you less of a market and it means that you need to start working even harder for business, but primarily I think you should take a step back and re-evaluate yourself, your market proposition and your target market.

You could decide to redesign your offering to be more applicable, or have a more focussed approach to your existing market, or even address those tasks that you had on your backlog that suddenly becomes top priority because your competitor is doing it..

Either way you would need to streamline your business and have a more focussed vision, ensuring an environment where the “customer wins” .

Another option is to consider an alliance or partnership of sorts. One of my friends who runs his own successful business told me that “A competitor is not always a competitor”. You could leverage each other and learn from each other to enhance your own portfolio and strengthen your own brand.

Even though I’m still very wary of competition, that sinking feeling has subsided. I have redesigned my offerings, focussing on, and better structuring areas that were a bit neglected. All in all I think creating a more holistic offering.

BTW: I actually met and had a chat with the president of “the competition” and it turns out he is not such a bad person after all

GoogleBot is thy friend

When starting the site I was considering using a couple of forms of paid advertising (such as Google AdWords) to gain visibility for the site. After playing around a bit with words and phrases (AdWords have a nice (free) feature that you can actually have a look and “estimate” potential impressions and costs) it turned out to be a bit pricey for what we were trying to accomplish. The next step was to put in effort to get the site noticed and recognised by google and organically obtain a high rank on searches.

One of the approaches is to use google’s webmaster tools to give google a “deeper” insight into the site.

Step one is to expose a “robots.txt” on your site to “hide” areas that you want to hide and to give googlebot the go ahead to check out everything else.

Step two, point google in the direction of a decent site map. The problem I faced with this is that google is not too happy with any format for this site map. After some trial and error I eventually found that the plain text version worked perfectly (go here to generate a quick version to start off with).

So now that google can see into your site we revised a lot of wording to emphasise words and phrases that we would like to be found on. You might have noticed “Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server” being repeated on the various pages a couple of times.

Now finally we tried to get other sites linking to Team Foundation once again in an attempt to get the “web presence” increased. So we looked around at the popular business listing sites and started listing on the free, no-catch sites we could find.

All this has brought us to be top of the list when searching on google in South Africa for phrases such as “TFS consulting”. All this without spending a cent!

Free Ebook: Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Get it while it's hot..


http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/09/13/free-ebook-moving-to-microsoft-visual-studio-2010.aspx

Some bed time reading on how to upgrade yourself from previous versions to Visual Studio 2010. It gives a detailed overview of how things change and what new features are available in a fairly unique approach.

You can find a detailed overview of the book here.
 
(cross posted from http://devtendencies.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-to-microsoft-visual-studio-2010.html)

Licensing...

It is surprising how quickly a day goes when you go from one meeting to another, but all in all a very positive day. First was a large corporate retailer with the potential of establishing TFS as their primary corporate work item management system (well if I get my way at least J ). There is a lot of potential here, but as we all know, corporates aren’t the most agile of entities, change takes time. One of their primary issues will be around licensing, as they do a lot of non-Microsoft (read Java and mainframe) development and testing – hence a bunch of licenses that would be required outside of the MSDN subscriptions that the MS developers already have. Microsoft has covered the Java market very nicely with Team Foundation Everywhere. But the primary problem is testers logging bugs and users logging work items.

Obviously the caveat exists where using "Team System Web Access" (TSWA) you can log bugs and work items without a CAL as long as you do not access work items that were not created by yourself. Unfortunately not viable in this corporate’s situation as teams manage buckets of items.

The next option is to look at buying additional CAL’s. At approx. $500 a CAL in South African terms not a cheap exercise.

The person I spoke to then spoke about an “external connecter” licence. But even if you could afford it, I don’t think that his situation would qualify for this licensing scheme.

Fortunately they use a fairly expensive product as it is to do test management, so a potential re-allocation of costs could be an option and getting back and reading up a bit I started looking at the possibility of SPLA licensing in a situation like this. It would definitely reduce initial costs, and be flexible to the amount of users on a monthly basis. Maybe something I must look into a bit closer.

The moral of the story: The complexity of the Microsoft licensing really causes headaches for the people on the ground that is supposed to use / purchase these licenses. I read an article stating that they would be surprised if a large number of the “fully” licensed companies were in fact fully licensed, possibly even paying too much.

On the positive side: when I got back fairly late in the afternoon, I was surprised by an email from a company asking about me. I had no contact with them before and have no idea how they got to me, but it was a real highlight. Maybe there is some hope after all.

Update

Well it has been a while, so I thought I would give a general update on what has happened so far. Unfortunately I have to say … not much.

I’ve made some progress with the licensing side of things; I’ve broken through the Microsoft guards and procedures to have access to the volume licensed software now.  The problem is that as a ‘hoster’ you need to have a Service Provider Licensing Agreement in place.

Check. Got that.

The next step is to give Microsoft their money, you need to report monthly usage so that they can bill accordingly (you pay for the actual usage, which you again (hopefully) bill the clients for). This should be done on the SPLA essentials “site”. 

This is where most of the registration pain has originated thus far. One and a half months later I still have not been able to get access to this site (even though this is what initiated the process of getting onto the spla and volume licensing agreements in the first place). I seem to be stuck in a : “I don’t have access; No our systems show you have access; but I don’t have access; but our systems show etc.  etc. etc..” communication cycle with the various levels of support around this issue.

Besides me consuming vast amounts of pricey bandwidth trying to get through MS support, I’ve been digging up old acquaintances and everybody that I have had some amicable interactions with to see if I can at least get the word out and in the process find some leads. Things are going slow (as expected) and I have no solid leads as yet, but still going strong.

Woes...

Well my transcript has been “found”. There was some issue when the exam was written that caused it not to be uploaded. So at least Microsoft is going to have it uploaded in the “the September run”. Luckily September is just around the corner, so let’s give them this much. After all, it only took a month… (Am I too nice to be able to run a business?)

Whilst we are on the subject of corporate Microsoft, to be able to be recognized as a SPLA reseller, you need to register on the SPLA essentials site. No problem, nice “Sign up” link and everything. That was almost 3 weeks ago. I have had numerous emails confirming activations and registrations of all sorts, and within this correspondence there are links to do further activations etc. Like a rabbit hole, just going in deeper and deeper with no final “here you go you are now registered and able to start selling”! I really think there should be a review of the flow of this registration and activation, really un-intuitive and error prone (As I’ve mentioned before). So this is another bottle neck I’m trying to circumnavigate.

On the brighter side, I received another job offer yesterday that after MUCH deliberation I declined. The company is a large retail chain in South Africa and it seems that they are now trying to go Agile. This would have been a very exciting position, had it not been for my delusion of having my own business. What makes this a positive is that they run TFS. They are busy upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and then TFS will be next in line for an upgrade. A friend of mine that works there mentioned how the TFS instance came to be and by the sounds of it, they are in need of someone like me!

I was initially worried that although I have a brilliant idea, the paying client base in this country may not be able to support a service such as this. This gives me a little bit of hope! I now need to bide my time and then see if I can get myself in there.

Build a business one client at a time.