Yesterday I've received my ordered DVD with goodies from Microsoft's partners that are in the Visual Studio Industry Partner Program. It can be ordered from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/partnerdvd/ and contains 67 products and trials, from all categories such as: Architecture & Design, Cross Lifecycle & Support Tools, Deployment, and so on. A interesting note is that the estimated arrival time printed on the package is 2nd December 2004, and I've received it 2 weeks earlier. Wow, very good response time.
With this ocasion I found out a product evaluated long time ago, named StarTeam now branded as Borland StarTeam. A few years ago, when I evaluated it, the company was named StarBase, and it seems that Borland bought it. It is mainly a change and configuration management system that can be used to replace VSS and improve the development process by providing traceability (another key requirement for MSF) of the business requirements into the actual output. At the time of the evaluation (back to 1999 - 2000) I was quite impressed by the capability of StarTeam: it was cross-platform, with both GUI native Windows application, and a command line either native and java based application, it provided a SDK in order to access the full capabilities and automate them.
There are a lot of other goodies included on this DVD, so I have to find some time in order to fill the bag.