Our history
about us | the founder | our products
Our company was founded in 2015. In the ten years since, we have gone from shipping extensions under the Microsoft DevLabs brand — accumulating over 130,000 installs across five extensions — to becoming an independent publisher serving more than 30,000 organizations worldwide with our own products.
This is the history of the company we built.
The decade of consulting and community work that laid the groundwork for MSkold AB is covered on our Founder page.
2015–2016 – Azure DevOps Extensibility
Working with the ALM Rangers and Microsoft to provide feedback on extension frameworks and the marketplace, we shipped several extensions under the Microsoft DevLabs brand:
- Work Item Visualization — 70,000+ installs
- Offline Test Execution — 9,000+ installs
- Enhanced Export — 17,000+ installs
- Test Case Explorer — 26,000+ installs
- Sample Data Widget — 6,000+ installs
2016 – Enhanced Export PRO: The First Azure DevOps Commercial Extension
As the number of extensions and users grew, requests came in for prioritised support, custom development, and support contracts. This was especially true for Enhanced Export, which had grown fast since its Marketplace launch in 2015. The extension was originally built as a proof of concept — to show that an Azure DevOps extension could be built without any Microsoft tooling. To meet the demand for new features and provide professional support, we restarted development and built Enhanced Export PRO.
We also partnered with the Microsoft Marketplace team to help test and develop the commercial publisher experience, and Enhanced Export PRO went live as a paid extension in the Azure Marketplace.
2017 – Query Tile PRO
In 2017, Microsoft approached us with an idea for an extension. Customers needed a more advanced dashboard widget, and Microsoft channelled a backlog of feature requests our way. In December 2017 we launched Query Tile PRO as a paid preview extension.
2018–2019 – Microsoft Closes the Commercial Marketplace
In 2018, Microsoft purchased GitHub — and that same year decided to end support for the commercial Paid through Microsoft program. We were faced with a choice: build our own subscription and billing platform, or leave the marketplace entirely. We chose to build. The process consumed most of our available time, and the time left went to trying to reach our existing customers — a challenge made harder by the fact that all prior communication had been handled through Microsoft, leaving us without a customer database of our own.
2019–2020 – A New Start
When Microsoft closed its commercial marketplace program on 30 June 2019, we lost roughly 75% of our customers overnight. It was a hard reset — but also the beginning of building something entirely on our own terms. Our customer base recovered quickly, and by the end of 2020 we had rebuilt around 70% of our customers and were continuing to grow.
2020–2022 – Watching, Learning, Preparing
Microsoft’s merger with GitHub created real uncertainty about the future of Azure DevOps, making it difficult to justify larger investments. We spent this period closely following developments in the GitHub ecosystem and what Microsoft intended to do with it — particularly around extensibility. In the meantime, our focus was on delivering first-class support and continuing to add features to Enhanced Export PRO.
2022–2023 – Query Tile PRO Goes Freemium
By 2022 we had accumulated a solid backlog of ideas for Query Tile PRO. To get them moving, we switched from a “free during preview” model to freemium — existing features stayed free, while new premium features would be available to paying customers. In June 2023 we re-launched Query Tile PRO as a freemium extension and quickly built a paying customer base around the premium tier.
2024 – The Idea Behind Wiki PRO
Over the preceding years we had increasingly encountered customer frustration with Azure DevOps Wiki and the lack of meaningful development around it. At the same time, customers who moved to alternative wiki solutions rarely found it to be a success story for their development teams.
This gave us an idea: what if we could build a wiki solution that genuinely works for both stakeholders and software teams? In 2025 we ran the first spike to determine the feasibility of a Wiki extension, and by mid-2025 development of Wiki PRO was underway.
Today
Wiki PRO is currently in private preview. Our aim is to release an initial public preview on the marketplace by mid-2026. If you want to be among the first to know when it launches, reach out to us at info@mskold.com and we’ll make sure you hear about it first.