Today's software systems are comprised of numerous distributed services, spanning platforms, protocols, and programming languages, all with significant impact on the operations environment. Moreover, teams have become increasingly specialized and geographically distributed. Successful deployment of modern solutions depends on bridging the communication gap between development and operations so that the entire IT department is represented early and often throughout the software lifecycle. The new Visual Studio Team System expands significantly on Microsoft's demonstrated successes in delivering highly productive tools, by offering businesses tightly integrated and extensible lifecycle tools to increase the predictability of their software development process.