Planning for Team Foundation Server 2010
When I speak on TFS - I always stress how important it is to keep up-to-date on the software. The features (not just bug fixes) in SP1 of TFS2008 were VERY significant. And heaven forbid being "stuck" on TFS 2005 (we all know what the conventional wisdom says about v1.0 Microsoft products...)
TFS2010 is in beta - and the improvements are even more dramatic than what we've seen with the last major and minor upgrades. Hierarchical work items alone is something that almost EVERY TFS shop I've seen has been clamoring for. And the list goes on and on. I recently installed the beta on a virtual machine and was playing with the new branching- which will REALLY make life a lot easier. I wish I had some dedicated hardware to checkout the lab management features... And the testing tools, historical debugging. There's a LOT there.
Clearly this is something that all companies using TFS need to start planning for - sooner than later. But this will be no easy upgrade. While the installation of the product itself has gotten much easier (not the best for consultant job security :) ) there are other considerations that will need to be considered.
This blog post diagrams what components are and aren't supported - and what's recommended to use TFS2010. The bottom line - if you are running your database tier on SQL Server 2005, your TFS SharePoint Portal on WSS2.0; if your clients are using Office 2003 you must upgrade those. Also - you will have to upgrade your build servers.
Furthermore, if you are running your servers on Windows 2003, running 32-bit servers or not running your TFS SharePoint portal on MOSS, you are using "supported" but not recommended configurations. At some point after the 2010 Release, Server 2003, and 32-bit servers will lose their support.
A release date hasn't been announced yet for these products - but the track record for Team System has been pretty good - so it clearly will be sometime in 2010 (if not before - TFS2008 was available in December of 2007!). So the sooner you start planning, the easier this upgrade will be.