CodePlex effort intended to boost company's Team Foundation Server product Microsoft wants developers using the company’s Team Foundation Server ALM (application lifecycle management) server to share process templates via a new project on the company’s CodePlex site for open-source projects.In a blog post this week, Microsoft’s Brian Harry, who holds the title of Technical Fellow, encouraged developers.“Ever since we shipped TFS, I have hoped that a community would form for sharing process ideas and for sharing process templates. Creating new process templates can be a significant undertaking,” Harry said. “It’s way easier if you can start with a process template that’s reasonably close to what you want and just tweak it.” Called “Templex — The TFS Process Template Library,” the CodePlex site has been set up for building a library of process templates and sharing them. TFS uses process templates as a way to configure new team projects, the CodePlex project page, accessible here, states.“It’s too early to tell whether or not it will thrive. It will depend on how many people decide to contribute something and how actively it is managed,” Harry said.In addition to holding process templates, the CodePlex project can hold work item type and report definitions. Process templates include security groups and permissions, an initial set of areas and iterations, work item queries, and project mappings. Version control permissions are featured as well.The full name of the latest version of TFS is Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It serves as an integrated collaboration server for the Visual Studio Team System ALM platform. TFS provides a unified server for portal, version control, working time tracking, build management, process guidance and business intelligence, Microsoft said. Software Development