Fixed the issue: Could not start build: You are not authorized to access

This morning, our team members could not queue a new build successfully. We got the following error message. But we can still hit the following URL successfully.

Go to security setting in TFS 2013 Dashboard  and I don’t see any issue at all.

After logging to build machine and restarting the related build services, I got the logon failure .It means the password of TFS build account was expired.

This error message “You are not authorized to access” is really confusing and Microsoft needs to provide the better error message to handle this scenario.

After updating the new password of TFS build account , queuing a new build is always successful. 

TFS 2013 Dashboard: Users can’t export work items to MS Excel ( bad design)

Today one colleague would like to export work items to MS Excel in TFS 2013 dashboard and he could not find it. I could not find it, either. It was working in TFS 2010 web access. I only see one option: Send query as an email. 

After posting a question in MSDN forum, I finally notice this feature was removed in TFS 2012.

The company pays so much money to let users use TFS 2013 enterprise version and finally they can’t use the basic function of exporting work items to MS Excel.  What should they do?

I would say it is bad design and not user friendly.