If you are a consulting team or systems integrator partner this post is for you. In the Visual Studio Online team we are aware that many of you are looking for ways to more efficiently deliver projects for your customers. It has been a very popular scenario in the adoption of Visual Studio Online. We are also aware that many of you are starting to adopt, or are already using Visual Studio Online and receiving the benefits of a fully managed Application Lifecycle Management platform that allows you to focus on building software, not managing infrastructure.
As a result of this increased interest in Visual Studio Online we've been looking into how teams are using the service to distill the common patterns and help you by providing guidance as to which patterns will likely work the best for your teams given the current state of the product.
We’ve come up with four patterns which the diagram below summarizes:
We currently recommend that consulting teams and systems integrators adopt either the:
- Single Customer Account pattern, or
- Account per Vendor/Customer pattern
To get more detailed information that discusses the pros & cons of each of these approaches, we have put together a set of guidance downloads including a whitepaper that you can download at http://aka.ms/VSOConsultingSIGuidance. We will keep it updated from time to time as Visual Studio Online is continually improved and based on additional questions or feedback that comes in from you so be sure to come back from time to time.
In addition to this guidance we have taken a look at the Visual Studio Online product and identified areas where we can make further investments to make the product even better for teams working of software for an external customer. If you have any additional suggestions, please leave a comment below or suggest new features/changes on our User Voice site.
Ed Blankenship
Product Manager, Visual Studio Online