After a year of beta trials, Microsoft has officially released its Team Foundation Service, a hosted version of its Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management (ALM) tools. For now, only the free version of the service is available; it supports five or fewer users. Microsoft has not said when it will launch commercial versions for larger groups or how much they will cost.
Features of the Team Foundation Service include version control, work item tracking, project planning and management, build automation, continuous deployment and preview mode building tools. According to Microsoft’s Karthik Ravindran “ALM has traditionally been known to be very enterprise heavy, but [this service] could be utilized by people who may not need enterprise scale but could still benefit from tools and services to manage their projects.”
Team Foundation Service runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
