Changing your TeamPulse Integration Service account Credentials

When TeamPulse is installed there are a number of components that are set up and configured on your server. One of those components is the TeamPulse Integration Service which is installed as a Windows service. The job of this service is to analyze your projects for best practices and to generate content that is to be used in the RSS feeds.

The RTM version of TeamPulse was released with an issue regarding the TeamPulse Integration Service default account that I will help you work around (this will be resolved in the next release). Currently this service is configured to use the Local System service account during installation; however this can cause issues with data access when a SQL Server instance hosted on another machine is chosen during setup.

If your TeamPulse Integration Service is hosted on a machine separate from the SQL server instance where the TeamPulse database resides, or the LocalSystem account is otherwise unable to access the TeamPulse database, you will want to change the account that the service runs under. If you are uncertain whether this problem is affecting you, a common symptom can be seen when running the Best Practice Analyzer, and is shown below:

Thankfully changing the account for the service is a relatively simple task. The following steps should get you up and running properly in short order:

1) On the machine where TeamPulse Server has been installed, open the Services snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console. On Windows 7 this can be found in the Administrative Tools section of the Control Panel.

2) Scroll down and locate the TeamPulse Integration Service. (Note that the “Log On As” user is currently Local System).

3) Stop the TeamPulse Integration Service.

4) Double-click the TeamPulse Integration Service entry to bring up the Properties dialog, and then navigate to the Log On tab.

5) Select the “This account:” radio button and enter the credentials of the user you wish to use to access the TeamPulse database. This user should probably be the same one that you entered during the setup of TeamPulse.

6) Apply the changes, and note that the “Log On As” user will have changed from Local System to the account you just selected.

7) Start the TeamPulse Integration Service.

At this point you should now be up and running and able to analyze your project for best practices correctly!