What is the difference between a TFS team and TFS group?

Question

When managing a project I can edit permissions at the team project level. The web interface allows to manage:

• Teams
• TFS Groups

However I cannot find any guidance on how these are different. Empirically I would expect a Team to be part of multiple TFS Groups, however it seems a Team can aggregate both teams and groups and the other way around.

Any idea of how the differ? Are alerts available only to teams?

Answer 1

In TFS, a team is simply a way of recognizing the team or teams you already have, whether that is one team working on a project, or twenty. TFS turns the often-intangible details of who the team is, what the team is doing, and when the team expects to be doing it, into traceable, easily used information for each of those aspects.

Team Foundation security is based on users and groups. You can help ensure the security of your Team Foundation Server deployment by correctly assigning permissions to users and groups, and by making sure that you only add users to groups if they truly need the permissions associated with that group. These permissions let users access only the data and functionality that they require for their jobs based on their roles and responsibilities on your team, and help you protect data to which access must be limited.

• Understanding teams
• Security groups

Answer 2

TFS team is used to group users. TFS groups contain security.

As of TFS 2012, it is possible to create unique and separate teams within a single team project which contains the BWI, sprints, etc. Each team is assigned a parent iteration, which help organize the reporting for that team. Teams help organization avoid creating multiple team projects for each team which provides more flexibility in managing sub teams within a team project.