Too Expensive

[Joe]

I am a long time Axosoft OnTime user, but always looking for something better.  :-)

I love your RAD kits, so I was hoping to love TeamPulse too.  It is neat.  I downloaded the eval and found some bugs but I assumed it would have an update schedule like your other products, so the bugs will be fixed.  It is the features that are missing that trouble me. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I do not see any of the following items that seem essential:

• Reporting - You need to have some way to generate reports and export to Word or PDF.   We're all accountable to somebody who pays our bills and they will not want to log in and look at the dashboard.
• Customer Portal - There needs to be a way for your user base to provide feedback about a product and easily transition those items into project items.
• Differentiating between fixes and features.  
• Workflow.
• Per item note taking.

Is this eventually going to be just a wrapper around TFS or a fully independent product?   If it is just something to augment TFS, then I can see you leaving these things off because TFS should fill in the gaps, except for the Customer Portal, which doesn't fit into the domain controlled login scheme TeamPulse or TFS requires.

But if you do intend this to be a fully stand-alone product, you seriously need to think about these features.   There is no way I am going to pay $250/person for this when I can pay the same for OnTime and get a much more evolved system with 5x the feature set.

[Joe]

Just to clarify, I do know that a few of the grids allow you to export to Word but I have only found 2 places you can do that and they are very basic and rudimentary.

[Missing User]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for trying out TeamPulse and leaving all this great feedback.

Reporting: We definitely agree that more reporting is required and it is a very important item in our backlog. What kinds of reports to you find you use the most? Or that your customers want to see?

Customer Portal: We have had a fair amount of feedback for this feature and are looking at what users would expect to see out of it. How much access would you want a user to have to their project? What would you want them to see or be able to add?

Differentiating between fixes and features: Another major feature in our backlog.

Workflow: We currently do have a workflow that is based on the type of template you choose but it might not be visible right away. When moving Stories from one state to another, the list of possible states changes depending on the state the Story is currently in. For example, with our TeamPulse template, if your current state is "Not Done" your possible states are "Deferred, Deleted, or In Progress". If you change your state to "In Progress" then your possible states change to "Deferred, Deleted, Done, Not Done, or Ready For Test". Were there other types of workflows you would like to see?

Per Item Note Taking: I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean having a notes field on every story and task? There is the "Description" field available when you are editing a story, did you mean you would like a field like that on Tasks?

TFS: TeamPulse is a stand alone product. In the future we plan to have a generic integration layer for users to connect with different development solutions. While we plan to work with TFS, that is not going to be our only solution.

Domain Controlled Login: We are looking at different solutions for login such as Forms login.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions as well as raises more. I would also like to assure you the we will have a regular release schedule like the Telerik control suites, so bug fixes and new features will come out often.

Sincerely yours,
Jesse Dyck
the Telerik team