On October 20^th at 9am CST, Jerry Flynn, Microsoft Developer Solution Specialist, will host a Microsoft webcast presentation on the Visual Studio Team System and the transition plan to the new products. 

With the upcoming release of Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, Microsoft will be making some exciting new changes to Visual Studio and MSDN Subscriptions products and corresponding pricing and licensing.

Prior to the release of the new products we are offering our customers a PRE LAUNCH PRICING PROMOTION that will provide you significant savings on the new products!

For the first time, Microsoft will be releasing a new class of lifecycle tools for software development called Visual Studio® 2005 Team System. The Visual Studio® 2005 Team System expands software development teams to increase the predictability of the software development process, shorten the development lifecycle, and enable IT departments to deliver greater business value. The Visual Studio® Team System consists of four client products—one “role-based product” each for Software Architects, Software Developers, and Software Testers, as well as a Suite that includes all three products—and one server product that facilitates team collaboration, Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server.  

In order to continue to provide value to our subscriptions customers, Microsoft has announced a new line of subscriptions offerings to complement the Visual Studio® 2005 products, including Visual Studio® 2005 Team System.  The new subscription products lead with a Visual Studio edition and include either an MSDN Premium Subscription or MSDN Professional Subscription. Although the names have changed to lead with the Visual Studio brand name, the subscriptions will continue to include benefits that MSDN subscribers are accustomed to receiving, including design, development, test, and demonstration use rights for operating systems and server products and other benefits.

MSDN Universal subscribers with active subscriptions at the time of the product launch, November 7^th, will receive:

• No-cost upgrades to their choice of Visual Studio 2005 Team System role-based subscriptions

• Promotional upgrade pricing to the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite 

If you do not own MSDN Universal today, there is an opportunity for Visual Studio and MSDN subscribers to receive promotional pricing to purchase, renew, or upgrade to MSDN Universal subscriptions now.  By doing so, you would be able to take advantage of the MSDN Universal transition upon Visual Studio 2005 product availability, in addition to receiving added benefits from MSDN Universal today.

For MSDN Subscription transition information go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005. For technical information and to see a demo of the new Visual Studio 2005 Team System you can go to: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/gettingstarted/default.aspx.