About a month ago, I mentioned that Visual Studio Online was making some licensing changes to better integrate the greater project team into the tool. The Stakeholder licensing changes were announced as live this past week. Of course this happened while I was away on vacation!

I have a theory: the best way to make something happen is to go do something else. So I spent the last couple of weeks road-tripping, hence the lack of new content the last few weekends. Lo and behold, the Stakeholder licenses arrive!

For no charge, any user in your team can be assigned the Stakeholder license to gain access to work-related tasks.The ability to add items to the backlog allows for opening up the data entry to more stakeholders to gather their input into the backlog.

Though Stakeholders can edit product backlog items, they cannot change the priorities on an item, which will be good news to Product Owners everywhere who want to make sure that Stakeholders can contribute to the backlog but not override the prioritization work they are doing.

More information on getting started as a stakeholder can be found on the official Visual Studio site: Work as a stakeholder.