Yesterday, May 12th, Visual Studio Online exposed a collection of service hooks which sends information to other services on interesting events that happen inside Visual Studio Online – things like builds completing, work items being updated, or code being pushed. Visual Studio Online supports direct integration with over a dozen services, and one of this services is Trello.
What I like most about Trello is the flexibility and how easy it is to handle everything related to tasks and lists. How cool would it be to create cards on Trello on a dynamic event-based way like for example events on Visual Studio Online? Well, with the new service hooks, magic can happen! Let me visually guide you how you can create a link between VSO and Trello.
First things first, you need to be a Team Project administrator. Once you have this permission, go to the Team Project administration page, and select the “service hooks‘” tab.
Click on plus sign to create a subscription. There you have an overview of the possible target services. There are some interesting ones like for example MyGet (Check it out!). The one that I’m particularly interested in is Trello. Select that one and click next.
You can now select a trigger for this type of event. What I want to do is create a new card in Trello (with a red label) when I add a bug to VSO. So in my case, I select the ‘Work Item is created” event. In the filter, I select the work item type “Bug”.
Next step is to link your VSO account to Trello. This will give you a User Token. Copy and paste it into the form.
You now have the option to select a board, a list and a specific label
The nice thing is that you have the possibility to “test” the service hook. Just click on “Test“, and let the magic happen!
That’s it! I can now enter a bug on VSO like this:
And in Trello, it will show up like this:
You can even show the history, including the full request details! How cool is that?!
That’s it. The VSO team did a great job on this one! I really like it! Enjoy
This was extremely helpful Alexander! I’ve been trying to look for a TFS/Trello integration tool and was very pleasantly surprised when a tab for Service Hooks popped up yesterday!
So far, I’m using Zapier as the middle man so that I can customize the Trello card better but I’ve only managed to do new work items. Have you (or anyone else) been able to update existing Trello cards when a work item is updated or a new comment is made on a work item?
Hi Jay! Thanks for your feedback! Unfortunately from what I experienced, the service hook can only create cards & lists, but not edit cards & lists. I looks like there is no “meta-link” between the two platform.
If you look at the integration with for example Zendesk (http://www.bfcamara.com/post/85562983333/vso-zendesk-integration), you will see that there is a reference betwoon both..
It will be a feature for VNext I suppose 🙂
That’s an interesting way to link back, by adding a URL link on the work item. If I get ambitious enough, I might just make my own service to integrate the two in the way that I want to. Thanks Alexander!
[…] As you can see the setup is a piece of cake and what you get is a solid integration of your customers and your team. ServiceHooks enable integration with more services. Fellow ALM MVP Alexander van Wynsberghe blogged about an integration of Trello and VSO. […]
i would like to have folks create/modify in Trello and have it write back to TFS. I know there is some Alpha code from Codeplex that does this and they have a module which works this way with Zendesk. Anyone have any experience with Codeplex products?