Third Shelf

When you deal with Team Foundation Server as an administrator, extra tools are always welcome. Below is a list and a short description of the (free!) tools that I have found invaluable:

Note: Most of these tools require Administrator rights and when used improperly may result in your TFS Server being broken beyond repair. Be careful and backup!

1. TFS Permission Manager: Allows you to add or remove TFS group memberships, Reporting Services role memberships and SharePoint role memberships. Permissions can be set for server and project-level permissions as well as AreaPath and Source Control permissions. You can create new TFS users with permissions identical to those of specified existing user and save user permissions as a template and use it later to create new or update existing users.
2. Team Foundation Sidekick: Very nice and handy utility to manage various aspects of the version control system in Team Foundation Server. It now includes a new sidekick called the permission sidekick. Other sidekicks include: Code Review Sidekick, Shelveset Sidekick, Labels Sidekick, History Sidekick, Status Sidekick and Workspace Sidekick. A must have tool!
3. Team Foundation Server Power Tools: Handy little tools that improves the Team Foundation Server experience. These tools include: Command line tool (TFPT.EXE), Build Notification tool, TFS Best Practices Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Work Item Templates, Custom check-in policies, TFS Server Manager,
   TFS Users tool and an Alert Editor. Note that the TFS Best Practices Analyzer has a dependency on the Windows Powershell. The Power Shell must be installed first.
4. TFS Admin: If the TFS Permission manager is to confusing to use, try out this tool. It supports adding, deleting, and modifying multiple user permissions from a TFS Team Project and apply them at the same time. It also identifies missing permissions from Sharepoint or SQL Reporting Services and corrects them. Bonus. Allows you to view a log of permission changes that have occured and defines what Sharepoint and SQL Reporting Services permissions should be automatically used when creating a new TFS user.
5. TFS Build Manager: A utility to manage Team Foundation build types in an environment other than Visual Studio and allows builds to be stopped and deleted with a lot more ease than what it was in TFS2005.

Most of these tools have been updated to work with TFS2008. I hope that these tools will save you time and make the Team Foundation Server experience so much better!