Conchango, the creators of the Scrum process template, recently released a new tool for visualizing and managing work items in Team Foundation Server. With the Task Board for Team System it is possible to manage work items outside of the Team System tools using a stand-alone Windows application. The tool is currently in beta (beta 2 is due to be released on august 15) and requires TFS 2008 and v2 of the Conchange process template. The setup was a no-brainer and the tool is intuitive to use. Here's a taste of what it looks like:

Another option if you want this kind of tool but rather have it as a web application is to use the Scrum Dashboard, which is community tool you can get from Codeplex. Great add-on which is also based on the Conchango Scrum template.

The latest release of the TFS powertools has been released and can be downloaded here.

There are two things this time that got my attention;

• A UI for setting up alerts to TFS using an editor similar to the work item query editor. This is a really useful enhancement since most people want to automate tasks based on the event model in TFS.
• Support for TFS in Microsoft System Center. With a dedicated TFS pack it will now be possible to monitor TFS the same way as other application servers. This add-on will be released as a separate download following the existing release mechanism for SCOM management packs.

Brian Harry has written a good post on what else is included in this release.