#513 – Azure DevOps, Rebuilt

This week we shipped the rebuilt Azure DevOps integration.

In Friday Ship #512 we said it was nearly ready, and on Monday it went out in v15.4.0. We rewrote the Azure DevOps integration from scratch around one idea: per-project access. Your team chooses which Azure DevOps projects Parabol works with, and Parabol leaves the rest alone.

Azure DevOps doesn’t have a per-project consent screen. When you connect it, there’s no step where you pick the projects an app can see, so Parabol enforces the limit itself.

Each Azure DevOps connection now lists the projects it shares with your team. Search, linked work items, new work items, estimates and Inspirations all respect that list.

New connections share nothing until you pick projects or choose “All projects.” If you already had Azure DevOps connected, we moved your connection to “All projects,” so nothing changes until you decide to narrow it.

Azure DevOps is now a source in the Inspirations drawers for Stand-Ups and retros. And since we were rewriting it anyway, we fixed a stack of long-standing issues:

If your team plans its work in Azure DevOps, give it a spin and let us know what you think!

New signups were 1,201 this week, 0.3% below the four-week average, while teams ran 1,745 meetings, 2.0% above the four-week average and 38.4% below the same week last year.

…taught Pages to embed almost any link. Paste a URL into a Page and Parabol now builds a rich preview on the server. It tries our curated providers first, then oEmbed, then Open Graph, and falls back to the hostname. Previews are cached and refresh in the background. This is part 2 of 4 of embeds in Pages.

…started counting active users over time. Customers keep asking us how many people were active last month. Each organization can now answer that from its own membership history. We also made “active team” stricter: a team now needs at least two members and a meeting in the last 30 days that at least two people joined. It’s merged and goes out with v15.5.0.

…moved Google Calendar into our integration registry, the shared plumbing behind every integration (we wrote about building it in Friday Ship #506). Calendar now uses the same settings row as every other integration and gets “Refresh token” for free. It also clears the way to build the Stand-Up and retro work drawers from the registry.

…tested Reporting designs with customers. They asked for three things:

We’ve started designs for reports delivered by email.

…tidied up. We fixed an error that kept the Linear and Jira project lists from refreshing, removed an API mutation that hadn’t done anything since 2022, and made Parabol’s count of when a team “last met” match our data warehouse.

…begin week 4 of 6 of Shape Up Cycle 16.

…ship work drawers built from the integration registry. Tabs will be ordered by how popular each integration is, with Jira first, and “Jira” becomes “Jira Cloud.”

…land part 3 of embeds in Pages. Stale previews will refresh when a Page opens, and Loom links will unfurl in Stand-Up answers.

…review Page Comments. Claude built a first version overnight. The code was surprisingly clean, and Claude chose on its own to store comments in our database rather than inside the Page document.

…settle how to retire the Team Health phase inside retros. Our leading idea: if the team has an open health check that not everyone has answered, let them answer it in the retro. If everyone has, skip the phase.