It’s here. After months of designing, building, testing, and beta-ing, we’re happy to announce that as of today, Stack Overflow for Teams has launched and is available to everyone!
The What & Why Of Stack Overflow for Teams
It often feels like developers have to know everything, constantly juggling dozens of tools, languages, libraries, and frameworks. To do this, they have to be able to quickly find the information they need in order to get back to writing software. When that information is public, all you need is a quick search on Stack Overflow to turn up an answer and be on your way. But when that information is internal and private, it’s a maze of stale wikis and lost emails.
Stack Overflow for Teams helps bridge that gap by bringing the power of Stack Overflow Q&A to a private space just for you and your team on stackoverflow.com. Ask and answer questions about all those proprietary, top-secret things that you can’t post to a public audience and create an accessible set of knowledge that you can come back to time and again. (No more having to re-answer the same question over and over again in chat!) It uses the same Q&A format, organization, and experience that you know from SO to help your team easily capture, organize, and find information.
Stack Overflow for Teams doesn’t just provide you with the existing feature set of Stack Overflow, it also has new features that make it easier for new users and entire teams to use it, like guided onboarding for getting started, revamped tag watching and email notifications, and Slack integration. You can also access all of your team’s data through our API.
Best of all, this all happens on stackoverflow.com — which your team probably already visits daily. When you search on stackoverflow.com, the private Q&A is also integrated into those search results so you can access both your private information and the wealth of knowledge from the existing community all at once.
Making Knowledge More Accessible
Over the last two years, dozens of large companies have adopted Stack Overflow for Enterprise for their own standalone, internal knowledge sharing communities in order to make proprietary information more easily discoverable. While Enterprise works great for these large (500+ developer) organizations, we needed to do something different for smaller teams.
Anyone who has deployed new software, particularly anything involving a knowledge sharing or community building, knows how hard it is to get users to come and show up in a new place. You need a lot of users and a lot of activity at the right time or you end up with a ghost town that nobody has any interest in. Drawing from our own experience in building hundreds of public and private communities, we built Stack Overflow for Teams to overcome many of these traditional challenges with adoption by placing the knowledge in a private space on stackoverflow.com. The combination of our onboarding tools, integrations, and hosting everything in one central location, means Stack Overflow for Teams works for any size group.
During beta, we’ve seen teams as small as five and as large as 200 adopt Stack Overflow for Teams successfully. Tim Golen, Engineering Lead at Expensify, summed it up pretty well: “We needed a good way of passing down knowledge between team members, because we saw the same questions being asked over and over in our instant message channels. Almost immediately, we found that the Search function in Teams returned relevant results in a quicker, more accurate way than chat would. We anticipate Stack Overflow for Teams increasingly becoming our go-to resource for knowledge-sharing.” We see similar results not just at our other beta users, but also internally through our own usage of Stack Overflow for Teams.
Get Started Now
Stack Overflow for Teams is available to everyone now — there’s a 14 day free-trial and after that it’s only $10/month for your first 10 users (additional users are $5/month). All you need to get started are a few teammates and questions that you know come up over and over again — we’ll guide you through the rest.
So go create your Team and let us know what you think!
PS: You can read up on the prior work we did building out Teams and keep up with new developments by following the For Work tag here on the blog.
Very exciting! Will definitely be checking it out.
Is there a robust export feature? The read API is cool for programmers, but for work, there’d have to be assurances that the data can be exported at any time.
The “Get Started Now” mentions the trial period twice, one mention could be removed.
@Pekka – yes, you can download all of your content at any time as JSON file
I second Pekka’s query about export. What are the possibilities there?
Also, what kind of assurances are made about data privacy/security?
Nice!
PS: Re security, I see: https://www.stackoverflow.help/support/solutions/articles/36000049257
@RSAW You can see an overview on data security here – https://www.stackoverflow.help/support/solutions/articles/36000049257-stack-overflow-for-teams-security-overview
So this is a great addition. What about if I don’t necessarily want this to be private? I own a code that is publicly available and people ask lots of questions about it. It does not have thousands of users, but about 100 users. Does it make more sense to use Stack Overflow for Teams or should I just create a custom tag for my code?
You should just post publicly on Stack Overflow under the appropriate tag
This is pretty exciting. I’m wondering about Slack integration – how feasible would it be to set up a bot to post new questions to our internal Slack? I didn’t see webhooks in the SO API.
@Carl – that’s exactly what the Slack integration does – just select tags, types of updates (questions, answers, etc), and a Channel to have it post in.
Any future plans for a self-hosted enterprise version? This product would pretty much be unusable as a service for any HIPAA compliant industries.
Is it possible to reimport the json data back into the team? It would be nice to resume teams if they ever get disbanded for any portion of time.
The pricing sounds more expensive than it actually is. In giant letters: “$5 per user per month”. In tiny letters: “Teams start at $10 per month and include your first 10 users.”
So, for a team of 10, it’s actually $1 per user per month. For a team of 20, it’s $3 per user per month. Even for a team of 50 it’s only $4.20 per user per month.
Maybe this feature only targets truly enormous teams where it really does round up to $5/user/month. *shrug*
Give reasons why you think database systems support data manipulation using a declarative query language such as SQL, instead of just providing a library of C / C++ functions to carry out data manipulation.
Tried all day to create a team, but no e-mail was ever sent. Yes, I checked my spam and junk folder. Could not submit a support request as the Teams support form requires a Team URL. Bit of a Catch-22, that.
Are you planning to support G Chat integration in addition to Slack?