Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) brings together a number of dimensions and perspectives which help software teams manage collaborative magic. This infrastructure allows the team make software and not worry about some of the mundane details that are hard to track using traditional collaboration tools (ie. spreadsheets, emails, documents).
For example, most projects which deliver value to customers end up lasting some amount of time. Over that time, lots of bugs are found and hopefully fixed before they impact the customer. Team Foundation Server (TFS) Work Item Tracking (WIT) helps manage the state of each of these bugs. These Bugs (capital B, the work items) have a state model definition which allows team members move the bugs through states (ie. active, fixed, fixed ready, fixed verified, etc…). Similar to Bugs, there are other artifact types that need to be managed throughout the project- for example, user stories, requirements, and risks with their own defined state model. This state model for a work item type allows the team to query for work items which are in a particular state. This is super powerful both at the detailed and time-aggregate level (ie. cumulative flow diagrams which show number of work items over a date range).
Michel Perfetti has posted a very useful work item control (http://tfsworkflowcontrol.codeplex.com/) which shows a visualization of work item state transitions over time. This is a very good example of how visualization of the dimensions managed by VSTS can help software teams.
Another example of a visualization is the branch management in VSTS 2010 Beta 1 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405662%28VS.100%29.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465202%28VS.100%29.aspx).
It’s very exciting to start seeing more of these visualizations that bubble-up the power of the integration provided by VSTS! I expect to see more in the future.