collaboration tools for techie & non-techies

[davetherave2]

Hi all,

Been tasked with looking at possible collaboration tools within the business and need something that is suitable for the following:

1) Links to TFS 2013 (on site installation)
2) Is suitable for the internal development team and can be used by external developers for collaboration only (no access to source code)
3) Is easy enough for our large non-techie user base to relay information to the development team and track discussions etc.
4) Can provide the management team with individual/ overall project progress from high level all the way down to individual developers.

I have briefly looked at the likes of Trello, Team Pulse and basecamp but just wondering what others use for their project management or do you just stick with TFS?

Any help will be greatly received.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

A white-board wall with marker pens, index cards, blue tac and post-its

We use trello for external-to-the-team stuff.

 

[davetherave2]

A white-board wall with marker pens, index cards, blue tac and post-its

We use trello for external-to-the-team stuff.

We have that already

Not the most portable solution though

I know one of our developers loves trello and it appears to have worked successfully with one of our recent projects but the lack of native tfs integration did cause some frustrations with having to double entry tasks/work items etc.

Ideally we are looking for that "magic bullet" that will aid us in managing projects but also handle on going concerns with bugs etc that users can submit feedback etc.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

meh. Integration with TFS can come in the form of a human making updates to the board, and when you have a conflab about the work the changes (of state of work) can be discussed person to person. Cards on the wall/tickets in system are just placeholders for a conversation with the interested parties anyway.

 

[davetherave2]

Ideally we want to make sure the amount of human intervention and breaking the normal coding day to a minimum, so that the process is streamlined as much as possible with using check-in policies etc to enforce some control over what is happening with projects and keep the rest of the business up to date.

With us working more with third parties we need them to be able to collaborate and create tasks, bugs, feature requests etc. But not have exposure to our source code.

I thought some of the additional features within tfs would work but having everyone involved in a project requiring a tfs cal to access important features like team rooms it's not going to be cost effective, hence the look for a third party solution that can aid us in this scenario.