Can TFS 2013 have email notications to multiple users that watch a work item

Question

I'm looking to reproduce the Jira watch functionality in TFS 2013. In Jira, you can click a link to watch an item and thereafter you will be notified when anything on that item changes.

I know on TFS you can:

1. be emailed if anyone changes a bug you are assigned to
2. manually email a bug to anyone at any time
3. Create a custom report and pin it to your home page to notify yourself of things (like this maybe?)

I can imagine creating a new field that will accept multiple users and creating a custom email notification to notify everyone in that list if the work item changes. But that seem like a whole lot of work and I'm not sure were to start if that is the way do do this.

What's the easiest way to get functionality like watching a work item? If it's easy and similar to the Jira functionality that is better for me than exactly the same and hard to do.

Answer 1

Sure, you can setup email alerts based on many different criteria, including what you asked for.

You need to go to the Alerts section, and create a new custom alert, and you can put in the ID of whatever work item you want to "watch". By default it includes the clause AuthorizedAs <> [Me] which will make sure it doesn't email you for changes that you make, but you can remove that clause if you'd like.