Can I run TFS 2013 properly without SharePoint?

Question

Our small development team (2-5 users) is considering buying and deploying a TFS installation. Note: Visual Studio Online is not an option.

Currently we are looking at the necessity of also installing SharePoint with TFS 2013. We might be skipping the SharePoint installation because we'll be needing significantly more robust hardware with SharePoint than without.

However, it's not very clear to us what features will be missing if we decide to skip the SharePoint installation. Can anyone comment if below listed features can be used, in a web browser, if SharePoint is not installed with TFS? Thanks!

• Management of team projects;
• Management of team projects members;
• Management of team projects templates;
• Management of work items;
• Viewing code, changesets and history;
• Track work with backlogs;
• Display scrum boards.

Answer 1

I'm in a shop that uses both TFS 2013 and SP 2013 and we've never integrated and we've never had any issues or missed any big features. The main advantage is being able to tie together a SP team site with TFS projects and the data on both sides you can tie together as a result, which is more for visibility than for functionality.

I believe all of the features you mention above can be handled/launched from the Visual Studio interface or the TFS default web site or by using the TFS Power Tools.

Answer 2

All of the features that you mention above do not require SharePoint integration. In fact i would always recommend avoiding the integration as it provided no real value.

What you loose:

-Developers will not see a Documents node in Team Explorer and will have to go to SharePoint manually -A SharePoint team site will not be automatically created for each team project created -The bound SharePoint site will not be able to use the object model connected to TFS -Reports dashboards will have to be created manually.

Everything that you need is in the TFS stand alone web access.