Team Foundation Server delivers version control, work item tracking, build, a team project portal, reporting, and project management capabilities. A logical Team Foundation Server consists of two components: an application server, made up primarily of Web services, and a database server, made up primarily of a SQL Server 2005 database. In Team Foundation Server deployments, these two components are referred to as the application-tier server and the data-tier server. The application-tier server and data-tier server can be deployed on one server (a single server deployment) or two servers (a dual server deployment).

To take advantage of the Team Foundation Build feature, one or more computers in the Visual Studio Team System environment can be designated as build computers. Team Foundation Build provides the functionality of a public build lab and is part of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. With Team Foundation Build, enterprise build managers can synchronize the sources, build the application, run build associated unit tests, perform code analysis, release builds on a file server, and publish build reports. Build result data is propagated to the data warehouse for historical reporting. Team Foundation Build works with other Visual Studio Team Foundation Server tools during the build process including source control and work item tracking. For more information about Team Foundation Build features and planning, see Team Foundation Build Planning.

Team Edition for Testers lets you create, manage, edit, and run tests, and also obtain and store test results. Several test types—including unit, Web, load, and manual tests—as well as the measurement of code coverage, are integrated into Visual Studio. Team Edition for Testers enables Visual Studio Team System users to run tests on remote computers, called a rig. A test rig consists of a test controller and one or more agents. The test controller and agent can be installed on one computer or on two different computers. One test controller can coordinate the execution of several test runs on computers which have the test agent installed.

Because the testing tools are integrated with the other parts of Visual Studio Team System, you can publish results to a database, generate trend and historical reports, compare different kinds of data, see how many and which bugs were found because of testing, and identify which bugs are not linked to a test that could help reproduce them.

Visual Studio Team System integrates with the authorization and basic authentication features of Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server to validate users. Visual Studio Team System is compatible with Windows 2000 mixed-mode and native-mode domains, and also to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 domains. Smaller organizations might use Windows Authentication and workgroups to manage their users instead of Active Directory, but larger organizations should use Active Directory. Visual Studio Team System uses existing Active Directory domain controllers in a large scale deployment. For more information about Active Directory, see Windows Server 2003 Active Directory (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=47541).

Team Foundation Server has an extensible notification infrastructure. Team Foundation Server can optionally use an existing SMTP server to provide e-mail notification capabilities to end users.