Incoming email trigger creation of a TFS work item?

Question

In TFS, we have alerts set up to send emails for specific events for work items.

Is there a feature or way to have an incoming email trigger creation of a work item?

This would help to log reported bugs coming from other groups in our organization.

If there's no built-in TFS feature, how could a custom component be built to accommodate this requirement?

Answer 1

TFS does not have this capability built in. Please see this MSDN Forum post to have some ideas how this can be done.

You could write a little service which connects/listen to a POP3/IMAP mail account and downloads the mails. Go through the mail which needs to have a specific structure or an attachement with the information needed by the work item. Then use the Work Item Extensibility API and create a new work item.

I can imagine a second solution. Configure your Sharepoint to receive incoming mails. Route them into a document list or something and let a workflow call the WIT API.

In 2010, the TFS Work Item Tracking Object Model is what you need to interact with the TFS server to create new work items.