TFS Work item solutions for attaching email communications

Question

For a couple of days now I've been searching for a solution that integrates ongoing work item communication over email into a specific work item's history.

For example once a ticket is created, if a specific TFS email account is included in email correspondence related to a specific ticket, some service would parse the TFS email account, read the email contents and attach the conversation to the work item. I've seen other ticketing systems support similar functionality.

The major problem I'm trying to solve here is to increase productivity by automatically keeping all tickets in sync with related conversations without user intervention.

Does anyone know of any commercial or open source products that can support this functionality?

Answer 1

I just implemented a cloud service using SendGrid that accepts emails at [workitemid]@mycloudservice.com and appends the email to the History of the work item. So if you forward an email to 1234@mycouldservice.com, the email date/subject/body is appended to the History of work item ID 1234.

Right now I have a lot of things hard-coded to my personal usage, but I'm thinking of making it generic/configurable for public usage. The big caveat is that the TFS server needs to be internet-visible (works great with Team Foundation Service). I'll update this answer when(if) I open it up for general usage. The code that handles the SendGrid POST is here if you're interested.

There is also the TeamCompanion Outlook add-in, that gives you a button in the ribbon to attach the current email to a work item. The last round I went with TeamCompanion I found it OK, but a bit buggy, and it may have slowed Outlook down (or that could have been psychological).