Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Bloomfire
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Bloomfire provides knowledge engagement, aiming to deliver an experience that connects teams and individuals with the information they need to excel at their jobs. Their cloud-based knowledge engagement platform aims to give people one centralized, searchable place to engage with shared knowledge and grow their organization's collective intelligence.
$25
per month
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Bloomfire
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
PTS: needed to bring a new senior marketing team member up to speed on how we got to our current TV campaign
Solution: Series featuring consumer insights, why specific spokesperson, agency brief, the entire creative process - scrips, animatics, rough cuts, feedback, and testing at each step. Including the actual creative from each step.
Total time to build: 1 hour
Concept testing:
PTS: things get lost, findable but version control
Solution: everything in one placeConcepts, testing, IHUTs, verbatims, videos with transcripts. Reduces the possibility of missing something, helps with any builds (reuse), but gives us a the chance to dig deeper. Example: search on terms like "indulgent", or "crispy" or "share" much faster
Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!
I would recommend adding a feature to combine different posts/series by job title (so in addition to the Revenue Ops category, there could be a structured walkthrough for Revenue Manager).
Live Q+A sessions for group onboarding initiatives.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Most likely we will renew, our team needs a refresher on possible opportunities to advance our usage and learning of opportunities to move this answer to a 10, can't live without it.
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I like Bloomfire because it is more concise with the work I do whereas Google search engine would provide broader information. It has just been so user-friendly, and easier to use [than] I could have imagined. I would use this program over any other that I have tried in the past.
