The first thing that caught my eye was the introduction of the TFS Basic. One of the main complains about VSTS/TFS is that it is too big (in terms of servers and setup complexity) for small teams. In general I’ve seen that most teams (small and large) start with basic TFS features such source control and work item tracking. That later extends into build automation and reporting. TFS Basic provides these basic capabilities, but it allows scaling up as needed later on. Here are the details in Brian Harry’s blog.

There is also a new SKU just for testers which allows them to manage all QA activities (work items, test cases, etc) from the VSTS shell. Apparently this version works only for functional testing; it may not support coded tests. We’ll post an update once we give it a try.

Finally several new features were added to framework 4.0 in beta 2. My favorites are drag and drop data binding for Silverlight/WPF, VStudio extensibility improvements (if you ever had to write an extension you know how difficult this used to be) and finally the MSBuild improvements (Inline Tasks, yes!).

There is a lot to go around. You can check by yourself in the Beta2 release homepage.

There are several common things that most people consider right off the bat to make a decision such as cost, feature set, community support and how easy it will be to customize it. However, there are many other not so obvious but important points to consider that you may not think about before choosing a CMS.

The folks at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ did a great job creating a list of the most relevant characteristics of each CMS engine. In fact it goes one step further, it allows you to compare several different CMS side by side.

I’m not sure how often this data is updated, but we found it very consistent with our independent research for five different systems.

Hope you find this tool useful if you did not know about it.