I have been meaning to blog on this for a days now - today I decided to stop procrastinating.  Most have by now seen the news about MS buying TeamPlain to add a web interface to Team Foundation Server.  What a great move!  I was talking to Steven Borg from Accentient a little over a month ago about this very thing - when I heard the news I was pumped.   This fills a major gap in the product and will at least here at Intel help us foster adoption of Team Foundation Server.  We now have a corporate instance available for people to start to leverage - the next step for us is to make sure people are educated on how to take full advantage of TFS's features.

The publishing of the Team System roadmap was very cool as well - Rosario hasn't been a secret as Mary Foley and others disclosed the codename for the VSTS post-Orcas release, but it is nice to have it out there so that we can "officially" talk about it.  The stuff I have seen related to it looks very exciting and promising and I can't wait to see some bits out there - but I suppose we should wait for Orcas first.  Orcas has some great stuff as well - LINQ looks awesome (I have played with it just a little bit) and the CI stuff coming from TeamBuild will be nice as well.

Oh and I am excited to hit Islands of Adventure at Tech Ed this year as well (I am sure the sessions will be good as well!).

On my Spaces site to the left of my blog I am syndicating my link blog from Google Reader - I love that feature that they allow me to mark items as "Shared" and there is a public site for it as well as an RSS feed - very, very cool feature.  It has reduced the need for me to do a link parade or party like in the past because I just share it from Google Reader - I love Google Reader by the way.  I track about 160 plus feeds these days and push out the interesting stuff to my link blog so subscribe to it there is tons of good stuff in there!

In particular I liked the case study - not sure that I have always seen that be the case in my own organization - but it is a reminder for those smart guys out there - that you can be as smart as you want, but if the next guy is as well and you try to take your smart thing and his smart thing and put them together they just may make you look dumb because many times they don't work together.  Communication/Collaboration is king!

Link to Agile Journal - High Performance Agile Teams: An Overview of Collaboration

Simply amazing story about Customer Service - in our day of poor service in the name of low cost it is nice to hear a story from ther other side!

Link to Customer service gone shockingly right - Fiendish Glee Club

Link to » After slamming Intel for using retired benchmarks, AMD does the same thing in China | Berlind’s Testbed | ZDNet.com

In interest of full disclosure I work for Intel and it sounds like we weren't doing the right thing either (I have no knowledge of how we work such things as I am a software engineer on the manufacturing side of the house), but seeing as how everyone seems to think we are evil and AMD is innocent I don't mind seeing them take some heat for a while.  The truth is listening to benchmarks from any company about their own products is going to be an iffy proposition at best.  Whether it is MS and Oracle about the RDMS products or Intel and AMD over processors or car makers about their cars.  Independent reviews are the best for intellectual honesty (of course you have to scrutinize those "independent" reviews to see who paid for them!).