Creating and setting up a Team Room

Permissions required: Project Administrators groups can create and administer Team Rooms that they've created. Team administrators can only manage Team Rooms for Teams they're administrators of.

License required to access Team Rooms: Only Basic and Advanced license users have access to Team Rooms. Stakeholders cannot access Team Rooms and need to be upgraded to Basic to participate in Team Rooms.

Increase Team productivity by discussing work in progress, asking questions, sharing status, and clarifying issues that arise. Your Team Room provides an area for fostering and capturing communication among Team members, both near and far. Team Rooms are not scoped to a Team Project collection, so you can track multiple projects in a Team Room. Team Rooms allow you to see conversations by date, to see historic conversations, click on the left arrow in the top bar in the Team Room. You can alternatively select a date from the calendar.

The manage events give you access to various events as follows:

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, since the FabrikamShipRoom has a subscription for Work Items an alert gets published in the Team Room when product backlog ID 1 is created. The Team collaborates to figure out the root cause and fixes the issue.

By clicking on the audio icon on the right panel, you can optionally mute and unmute the sound on new messages in the Team Room. The data for the Team Rooms is saved in Team Foundation Server. It is possible to retrieve the Team Room data using the TFS REST API's, we'll be covering this in Chapter 8, Extending and Customizing Team Foundation Server.

By default, a Team Room gets created with every Team or Team Project you create. Team Rooms can be renamed. It is also possible to delete a Team Room. However, once a Team Room has been deleted, it is not possible to recover the Team Room or any conversations from the Team Room. You'll see the Rename and Delete option in the context menu by clicking on the left of the Team Room name from the left panel in the Team Room hub.