Where should I store documents – TFS or SharePoint?
This was the question which came up during our internal development meeting and hence I had to explore more in depth, rather than closing the topic saying – “Documents in SharePoint & source code in TFS”.
My perception here is – It depends on who the proposed end users are.
Since documents related to development needs to be shared and updated within the development team most of the time, it is generally advised to store the documents within TFS. After that – based on the needs (sharing them outside the development team), portal site can be used to share the documents. Please note that in order to ease out this operation, code collection can be associated with an appropriate document library within SharePoint portal.
But on the other hand SharePoint seems to be general preference to store Project related documents over TFS– for the simple reason that it is easily accessible and with Versioning ON (while using a document library). But versioning is very limited in SharePoint as compared to TFS, but works well for documentation.
As far as configuring document library to store documents – it’s pretty straightforward.
Regarding configuring TFS to store documents, it is similar to projects – creating a folder structure to accommodate all types of documents. Check-in/out is same as how we do it with our source code. While using TFS, we may have to compare different versions – for which we wouldn’t be able to us TFS’s inbuilt compare tool since it compares only binary content. Below are couple of other options:
- Diffdoc – has the capability to compare documents
- Using tools available within SVN
- Other 3rd party tools
Here’s a link which helps with configuring the tools within TFS. Here’s another link which helps in configuring SVN to compare documents.
As far as accessing documents and files outside of Visual studio, we have 2 options
- Using web installation part of of TFS – http://xoxo:8080/tfs/.
- Using Team Explorer 2010 – Here is the link to ISO download
