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Stack Overflow for Teams

274 points by cheath 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
coryfklein 8y ago
I'm excited at the potential this has to organize your own internal information that normally lies stagnant on a wiki (or heaven forbid, email) with no context of whether it's still valid or useful to anyone. It seems like it would be particularly useful for organizations with a distributed work force. On the other hand, so much of StackOverflow's value comes from the economies of scale at hand, and I'm uncertain how well the model scales down to small sized teams or even medium sized companies.
- cheath 8y ago
  yeah, that's definitely a huge product challenge for us! some things do work differently than stackoverflow.com to help with that - we built integrations to help surface questions to the right people in your team quickly (rather than the shotgun approach on the public site). and we've also built mechanisms to help guide you towards building a successful community (since it starts as a blank slate).
- klenwell 8y ago
  There was an open source version of Stack Overflow that I set up internally a few years ago at a previous company. I was the only one on the team who actively used it, but even then I found it useful as it was a place to squirrel away these useful little pieces of information you come across and don't know quite what to do with. I ended up coming back to find stuff I'd put there a few times and was starting to refer others to questions here and there. Then after a couple months, just as it felt like it was getting some traction, the server got wiped out accidentally by our server team and there were no backups. I never got around to putting it back up. I hope not having your knowledge base arbitrarily wiped out by careless admins would be a feature of this service.
  - cheath 8y ago
    can confirm: that's definitely one of the features of this product.
  - Grae 8y ago
    What tool did you use, and would you recommend it? I'm considering that route for project-relevant questions my students have.
    - klenwell 8y ago
      I believe it was this: https://github.com/dzone/osqa https://github.com/dzone/osqa But not positive. I vaguely remember it was a Python product. Not sure I can recommend it. I remember it not being nearly as polished as SO and not sure it's being actively maintained. It's a shame that you can't use Stack Overflow itself constructively for this. I think Stack Overflow usage would be a great lesson for any introductory class. Just teaching new devs how to write a good Stack Overflow question is an invaluable step in problem-solving, even if they never post it. Unfortunately, at the moment, I fear a good part of that lesson would be "the talk" about navigating the tricky culture of Stack Overflow.
tekkk 8y ago
My question is, is this better than your self-hosted wiki? At least that's cheaper and isn't a vendor lock-in. Sure wiki doesn't have the best possible UI and the UX might be too so-and-so. If I were in a position to buy this kind of service I'd still want something more out of it. Maybe if it offered a way to export Slack threads into SO as questions so they wouldn't get lost. Sure you could generate those questions manually from the thread and maybe prune them a little but I've found mostly people are too lazy for extra-work like that. Anyway that's my first impression, take it as you want.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Nearly every company I've worked at is already paying for a vendor locked-in wiki. Of course, ADDING StackOverflow means they're now paying for TWO vendor locked-in wikis (at least until they can shut down the old one, if ever), but it may be still be a net improvement.
  - jfriend 8y ago
    FWIW, Stack Overflow for Teams isn't a wiki.
    - coryfklein 8y ago
      Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-a-wiki/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...
      - jfriend 8y ago
        That's Joel's version of link bait headline. It works nothing like a wiki. But of course, you already know that if you've used Stack Overflow. But, tomato, tomato.
        coryfklein 8y ago
        wi·ki noun a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users. StackOverflow is a website that allows users to edit the content of questions, answers, and tags. It also allows users to write new questions, new answers, and close existing questions and answers. How is that "nothing like a wiki"?
krupan 8y ago
Has anyone tried one of the open source clones sich as question2answer? http://www.question2answer.org http://www.question2answer.org
shusson 8y ago
I'm confused by the pricing. Is it $10 a month for up to 10 users and then additional $5 per new user?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cheath 8y ago
  Sorry for the confusion. Your assumption is correct. $10 month total for the first 10 users (so, regardless of whether you have 3 users or 9 users, it's still $10/month). And then $5 per new user after that.
  - shusson 8y ago
    thanks I know you're probably targeting larger companies but for small teams there's a big difference between $10 a month and $5 per user per month :p
    - cheath 8y ago
      absolutely :)
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Also they are offering promotional pricing - before July 1st it's $4.15/user.
cryptos 8y ago
Can this be connected to Active Directory?
- cheath 8y ago
  not yet. but supporting SSO options is on our near-term roadmap. however enterprise edition does support AD/SAML out of the box. stackoverflow.com/enterprise
yehosef 8y ago
This is an interesting play but doesn't seem like a good fit. The examples on the front page: "how do I connect to our database", "what kind of email templates do we have". Are these questions that you're going to get multiple answers for and I'm going to upvote the best and/or select one as the "selected" answer. I would think this would be a sign of dysfunction in most cases. And how does the gamification play into it? (maybe it's a secret bus-factor detector.) It seems like a regular wiki/knowledge base would be a better fit for this kind of knowledge. How would the SO structure help. A related note, I wonder if you can disable the "Soup Nazis"[1] feature or it's too deeply embedded in the psyche of the product. [1]https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php
- shusson 8y ago
  I think searching and linking to existing questions (internally and externally) would be useful.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    The useful parts you name sound a lot like a wiki.
    - always_good 8y ago
      SO is a wiki. Except that instead of writing aimless documentation, you can document exactly what people are asking about. Which makes it better than just about every wiki I've used at a company or Github repo which just get out of date because they are so arbitrary and unfocused.
cryptos 8y ago
Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" is only half the price. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions
- Steltek 8y ago
  I'd rather not learn a 9th Atlassian specific markup language. I find JIRA and Confluence to be uncomfortably slow, even on high end hardware. I recall SO took a "scale up" approach but hopefully they can do better.
  - Shank 8y ago
    I 100% agree on the speed here. I thought it was just my inability to self host Atlassian products. I tried Atlassian OnDemand and the performance was actually worse compared to self hosting. I legitimately don’t know if I’m just bad a “tuning” their stuff, but JIRA and Confluence in particular were nothing short of miserable to use daily. Bamboo was great, but it had a lot less daily interaction than JIRA, for obvious reasons.
    - farkas 8y ago
      We have recently replatformed Jira and Confluence in Cloud: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/atlassians-two-year-cloud-journey/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/atlassians-two-year-cloud-... I'd encourage you to take a look again.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  "Questions for Confluence" surely benefits from its synergy with other Atlassian products, but it's not clear to what extent. Auto-linking of Jira tickets numbers? Unfortunately for folks like me down in the trenches, the manager types typically have more sway when it comes to picking products like this. Expanding the Atlassian license to include one more product probably sounds much easier to them. However, the $1.65 per user difference in price is likely not going to be a deal breaker for these decision makers if it can be shown that StackOverflow, the clear dominant player in Q&A, has a superior product.
baud147258 8y ago
Do you think we'll get the "closed as primarly opinion-based" flag squad on SO for Teams too?
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Actually this brings up one of the things I like the most about this SO for Teams idea - it could also be used as a sort of slant.co substitute, where a large dev team is trying to settle on a common programming language or persistence framework, and each person can register their opinion or vote on an existing one. After N days, the whole group decides to select the option with the most votes. Since voting is anonymous, everyone can give their honest opinion, or even vote for multiple. If you don't like the "opinion-based" close reason, you can just not use it on your team.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    It was a weak joke concerning the usual complaints about SO and because I thought it was an on-premise offer, not integrated in the main SO site. As said below, there's no flagging in SO Teams. If you need anonymous voting for decision concerning language/framework, I think you have a big problem: it would mean individuals are afraid of voicing their opinions regarding a technical choice and that's not something that can just be solved with a tool.
- KyleBrandt 8y ago
  Currently the only close reason available inside Teams is "Close as Duplicate". There also currently is no flagging inside a Team.
Clanan 8y ago
I'm sure I'm ignorant of other reasonable options, but this one is quite appealing as a small co, even if only used by one person. Just yesterday I was thinking about better ways to store easy-to-find answers to those dang tech issues that pop up once every six months. "How do I install pip manually on OS X with xyz constraints?"
EGreg 8y ago
Why use this when Discourse is free? It is an open source product that lets you store all the data in your own database. And it’s by the same guys, too.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Because Discourse is a message board, not a Q&A site? Not bashing Discourse at all. In fact I wish I saw it in the wild more often.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    A forum is nearly there. With open source, all you need is a third party plugin to turn it into what you want: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer-plugin/30155 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answe...
    - coryfklein 8y ago
      That plugin hardly turns Discourse into a full fledged Q&A site. It merely adds a button to mark a specific post as "The Answer". While that may be sufficient for many, there is a reason that StackOverflow has tags, tailored search, reputation, closing, etc. That's what they are selling with that $5 price tag.
      - EGreg 8y ago
        Discourse has tags, tailored search, badges, closing, and with this you can mark the right answer. But you can’t have voting up and cute Q&A related badges, true. And reputation is also tricky. But for many people, being able to own their own database for free will trump those things.
      - Can_Not 8y ago
        It's funny you refute that forum add-on, as it is a good add-on, but it's also just an add-on. A band-aid, not a solution. Too often I see the selected answer "pulled up" to the top, but it's actually just the tail-end of a longer conversation, where the context of the conversation is critical to understanding the answer itself. Not to mention that comment responses (to both answers and the question itself) are interwoven together like a big bowl of spaghetti. Meanwhile, I think StackOverflow, while great, is not living up to it's potential. I'm currently brainstorming/prototyping a StackOverflow alternative that covers the Q&A scenario, but adds support for more advanced features. If a question is opinion based, then you could have answers categorized into sides. Yes or No would be a common example. React vs VueJS vs Ember could be some side options in a question. OOP vs FP vs Procedural could be sides for another question. What is the right way to X can have a different answer depending on your "side", or it could be that the sides themselves are in disagreement. Sometimes it's nice to see and understand why another side prefers X. Let both side's top answers stand side by side at the top. Another idea is improved connecting of similar, but unmergable, questions. Another idea to connect questions by dependencies. A user could select some premises before asking, debates could be derailed less often by linking debunked arguements to their open debate page where there could be a large chain of custody on each element and nested prerequisite showing why it's wrong. Prerequisite could also be a word definition ("theory" is a random shower thought in some contexts, but in other contexts it's an explanation backed by so much evidence it's a strong candidate for established fact that could only be replaced by an expanded explaination, not an alternative one). Prerequisites could also be an axiom. In addition to questions, there could also be "claims". "Answers" to claims would basically be supporting evidence or refuting evidence.
vortico 8y ago
>team member has been fired for posting off-topic question
tarr11 8y ago
So much of the core mechanics of SO relies on SEO and a community of volunteer moderators, neither if which really exist in a corporation. I suppose if a company had a paid librarian function, this could be successful. But in that case, even a normal wiki would probably work. I seem to remember an article from Joel or Jeff many years ago describing why this exact model won't work. Can't seem to find it now though.
parvenu74 8y ago
Seems like "yet another tool to try to offset the problem of requirements, code, and architectural decisions not being adequately documented for future staff to understand." Sometimes I wonder if software teams should add technical writers embed with developers, architects, QA, and BA assets to actually document All The Things and keep documentation up to date. Yes, that will mean re-writing documentations as people change their minds in response to business needs but it would provide an historical record that answers "How the hell did our systems end up looking like this?" which seems to plague every organization that hires programmers to write custom code. Sometimes it's hard to give the developers who wrote the code the benefit of the doubt that they made the wisest decision based on all known variables at the time. I'm certainly guilty of questioning the intelligence, breeding, motivations, etc of the programmer of an app I had to modify once... only to realize that I had written the code in question four years previously. Eventually I remembered why the feature had to be coded that way and wrote a 1200 word comment section explaining why the feature was written the way it was and how one should orient their state of mind to understand and edit the logic. And I further apologized for the clusterfuck of code that the feature was and left my personal email address in case a future programmer wanted to berate me for it. And three years later I did get an email from someone saying they had been laughing for ten minutes because they had gone from "WTF?" to gradual understanding as they read through my verbose description of why... ending with laughter that I was willing to take whatever vitriol they had left over via email so they could vent and get back to work. Whether that dev updated the comments to reflect their changes is something to which I have no answer.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  For the past few weeks, I've been digging into a codebase that is legendary among my team for its complexity. While I have disagreements over some architectural choices, the biggest pain point has been the lack of documentation: when I look up the JIRA story referenced in the git commit, it's often a 4-pointer (the highest value we use before we break stories up) with no context. I found one story that had EIGHT pull requests linked to it, and all that was documented was "modify {entity}". This code base is not even two years old, and I'm already concerned about its long-term viability. The colleagues that worked on it are extremely helpful, but details are fading from their memories over time. Its one saving grace is the fairly extensive test suite, so at least I have some degree of confidence that I won't be breaking things whenever I look at it the wrong way.
colshrapnel 8y ago
Stack Overflow largely relies on Google Search, but for private teams it won't be available. And internal search is just unreliable. Also I fail to see how answers on SO for Teams are supposed to be less "stale" than your old wiki articles. For me, at least our corporate wiki is more organized, without duplicates, whereas Stack Overflow's modus operandi is largely relies on creating thousands of duplicated questions.
gchp 8y ago
An open source alternative I've used in the past is Askbot: https://askbot.com/ https://askbot.com/ It's built on Django, and covers all of the standard Q&A features that I've needed to use.
- mikhailt 8y ago
  Site doesn't work, refuses to connect. Adding www. tells me it is an invalid cert.
baud147258 8y ago
Joel wrote a blog post about it, detailing how it currently works: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-overflow-for-teams/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-o... It was already linked on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574
Kiro 8y ago
I want to create a public Stack Overflow, just using the engine but rebranded as my own QA site.
- privacypoller 8y ago
  They used to do something similar to this, but then co-opted all the popular sites and shut down the rest. They had a parenting one that was pretty successful - probably because Jon Skeet was prolific on that one as well.
nkg 8y ago
I have thought about building this so many times. I think there is a need for it, particularly for non-technical teams where processes don't evolve that fast, but adoption will be hard to ignite.
- pugworthy 8y ago
  Agreed - this is for many kinds of people, not just technical people.
british_india 8y ago
Stack Overflow: home of bullies, assholes and trolls.
bluedino 8y ago
There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.
- tootie 8y ago
  I think the win would be in making the answers more findable. Confluence is great for writing documents and laying out pages in a hierarchy, but full-text search is still very hit and miss. Especially when you have 50 projects that all have the same keywords and 49 of them are irrelevant.
  - gregmac 8y ago
    Or one person calls it "SomeTitle" and someone else only uses "Some Title" and search has no concept those are the same thing.
  - htaoerth29th 8y ago
    > Confluence is great for writing documents Citation needed. I use it almost daily and it's essentially write-only and pretty unusably so at that.
    - falcor84 8y ago
      >> Confluence is great for writing documents >... it's essentially write-only Seems like there's no disagreement here :) Anyway, as I see it, as someone who has written quite enough if it, most software documentation is write-only 99% of the time; but it is occasionally very handy to have that documentation written by the original developers when shit really hits the fan.
- some_account 8y ago
  Even if they read, it gets old really fast usually and who have to update it? You. So now you have two problems :)
Shank 8y ago
So the biggest reason why I can see this succeeding is because of onboarding. In fact, I'd say that's the killer feature. It takes one person going through a development environment setup process to be really useful. They'll ask a lot of questions, get the answers...and then the setup process is suddenly really well documented without anyone having to go through the trouble of documenting it without knowing what to document. Since new employees are expected to ask questions on how to get things working, using SO for Teams is natural. Then, explanations that would normally be sent in pieces over IM can be recorded. The information still ages, but aged information on the right track is infinitely better than nothing at all.
amelius 8y ago
How easy is it to migrate your data out of it and into something else?
- jpitz 8y ago
  This was essentially my first question - who owns the data?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
Continuously surprised at the lack of basecamp in these conversations. Seems like still the best tool to me.
rwilsonperkin 8y ago
We've been running this in beta for a couple months now, happy to answer questions about it. The SO team has been super helpful during the process.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Roughly how many programmers do you have? What difficult has it been to get people to participate (on either end of the scale)?
  - rwilsonperkin 8y ago
    About 50 programmers, yes we've found that it wasn't natural for people to start asking their questions there and that we (the team that opened the beta) tend to seed Q&A there to drive people to the tool.
- nwsm 8y ago
  What did you have in place before this (wiki, Slack, Yammer or something like it) if anything? Is this better than finding the right person to ask, or posting in slack or something? In my org we have a wiki on topics and if that fails an "experts" list with people to contact for further help. There is also a yammer group for asking questions, but that is rarely used. I think this could be helpful, but whether or not it's worth the cost would be a question for someone else.
  - rwilsonperkin 8y ago
    Our documentation is split up between markdown files in-repo and a wiki (Confluence) with lots of assorted information. Interestingly we do the same kind of thing with an "experts" list, but with a focus for on-call engineers so they know who to contact if something's broken. A lot of people still have a natural inclination to just post their questions in chat - probably because it's lower friction than typing up a question and then posting that in chat. We've been trying to shift this by re-posting people's questions in SO and answering them there. It's been mostly helpful, but I'd say we still have a ways to go in shifting people towards SO.
pknerd 8y ago
At least the frequency of questions getting closed without any sane reason will be lesser than Stackoverflow.com
dandigangi 8y ago
Totally misread the title and thought it was for "Teens". LOL
- mathgeek 8y ago
  The concept of "Stack Overflow for Teens" seems like a parody goldmine.
pugworthy 8y ago
I think it's a mistake to look at this from the perspective of software developers. It's called "Teams" because it's for teams - which can be anything from software developers to facilities maintenance people. It's for teams that have questions (and answers), not for software developers who have questions (and answers). By way of experience with this, we run an internally written Stack Overflow clone of sorts for a large industrial printing product we make. It's meant for people in our organization who have questions and are looking for answers. And as such, there are no "wrong" questions. For example, someone might ask, "I'm traveling to the San Diego site - what's the most convenient hotel to stay at?", and create a new tag for "san-diego", "recommendations", and "hotels". Or they might post about "Top-of-form mark detected too close to the previous frame" using tags like "print-engine" and "top-of-form". For us, both types of questions are very valid and "on topic" questions to post in our internal stack. When we first launched our stack, we imagined it as being a kind of "crowd sourced internal knowledge capture" tool. But a real evolution in our thinking has occurred, and we've found that most people use it to post questions and answers at the same time. In other words, they've solved a problem and want to share the solution. And SO's "question/problem statement" followed by "answer/solution" template and framework makes it very easy for them to share this knowledge. Contrast with a wiki for example, where they are presented with a blank page and told to "document this issue". One feature we are considering is the idea of wizards for certain types of posts. For example, if you are posting an answer about equipment work that requires opening electrical panels, we probably should have a warning about only doing this if you are certified for it. So the wizard idea might say, "Is this a solution that relates to electrical safety?" Checking yes automatically appends some boilerplate text with a caution about electrical certification. We've also found that the voting up/down feature isn't that useful. People just don't do that voting stuff, nor do they really care about their reputation. What we are going to do is replace the vote system with a simple, "Did this answer help you?" type approach. It's literally the same thing, but with a different way of asking it. Because we don't actually do "down" votes, a "Yes" is a vote up, and a "No" prompts the user to post a comment explaining why it didn't help them, assuming it was what they were looking for. Was the answer not clear? Was it wrong? Did it not work? Is the information out of date? This kind of feedback (via comments) will help answer authors evolve their content to be better.
sdsdsdsdsdsds 8y ago
Slightly offtopic, I recently looked at all top free internet websites/services that I use and wondered which of them I would miss if advertising dollars dry up. For me, it turned out to be stackoverflow and Google. I truly hope stackoverflow is a profitable venture at this point. I hope they have been trying various avenues to make money but no o no one has any info on profitability. Job ads pay well, but there is fierce competition there.
makecheck 8y ago
Over the years I’ve concluded, reluctantly, that the ONLY documentation solutions that matter are the code, revision control logs and issue trackers. Create massive comment blocks to explain things if you have to but put it all there in the code, next to the things that matter. Then it has half a chance of still being accurate. And, you know exactly where the documentation is. If the code becomes obsolete and is removed, you naturally strip out documentation that is no longer relevant at the same time. Revision control log messages are important. I so hate lazy messages; if you change 5 files in random ways and your message is “fixed bug”, I think you should be fired. If it’s in the issue tracker, your log had better mention the number. Add a paragraph daring to explain what the hell you did so I can read a sensible log history and figure out what happened when. Issue trackers are useful for capturing every relevant detail, especially new information that is found while the bug is being investigated. The bug might come up again, and details can help to sort it out.
- sametmax 8y ago
  How do you fit deployment doc in code ? And tutorials ? General graphs of the architecture ? Because an API reference is a very poor doc.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    Ideally your deployments are code. And tutorials are part of your website 'code', or integrated into your project (and thus 'code'). General graphs of the architecture would be docs in your code repo (and thus 'code' too). I'll admit tho that it's pretty sensible to just not consider some of those as 'code' and thus conclude that documentation outside of the code is important too. But the original commenter is also probably right that 'second hand' documentation is probably the least accurate.
  - makecheck 8y ago
    These documents are still things that can become out of date. Anything of this nature can be in a source file somewhere, even if it’s a giant overview comment in one of the main files. I do think it’s fine to create pretty docs from source comments or generate pictures from graph descriptions, etc. Every generated page should clearly state where it came from though (e.g. revision number and date). Frankly I don’t like having only an API doc without the implementation. Code should be open-source to those using it, under NDA if necessary. When I need to rely on hidden implementations from Apple, etc. I routinely have to waste time discovering things simply not working as described. Meaning, their pretty docs are out of sync with reality and it wastes significant time to find this out the hard way.
Johnny555 8y ago
"Rest easy knowing that your Team’s data is secured in a dedicated network and logically separated into its own SQL schema. Learn more about our security policy. " If its using logical separation on a shared SQL server, then is it really a "dedicated network"?
nwsm 8y ago
I'm not sure if it's worth it, but this struck a chord with me: >No more digging through stale wikis
cwyers 8y ago
I feel like holding out single sign-on for a separate Enterprise tier priced at "Contact a sale rep for details!" is a mistake. Heck, I feel like any "contact a sales rep for details!" pricing tier is a mistake.
pugworthy 8y ago
Pushing my message again, but if you've not done so in a while, visit https://stackexchange.com/sites# https://stackexchange.com/sites# and look at how many utterly non-technical topics are covered by this model. The application of the system is about far more than just traditional software development.
tracker1 8y ago
Was anyone else hoping to see a Stack Overflow plugin for "Microsoft Teams"? That would have been very cool.

274 points by cheath 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

I'm excited at the potential this has to organize your own internal information that normally lies stagnant on a wiki (or heaven forbid, email) with no context of whether it's still valid or useful to anyone. It seems like it would be particularly useful for organizations with a distributed work force. On the other hand, so much of StackOverflow's value comes from the economies of scale at hand, and I'm uncertain how well the model scales down to small sized teams or even medium sized companies.

cheath 8y ago
yeah, that's definitely a huge product challenge for us! some things do work differently than stackoverflow.com to help with that - we built integrations to help surface questions to the right people in your team quickly (rather than the shotgun approach on the public site). and we've also built mechanisms to help guide you towards building a successful community (since it starts as a blank slate).
klenwell 8y ago
There was an open source version of Stack Overflow that I set up internally a few years ago at a previous company. I was the only one on the team who actively used it, but even then I found it useful as it was a place to squirrel away these useful little pieces of information you come across and don't know quite what to do with. I ended up coming back to find stuff I'd put there a few times and was starting to refer others to questions here and there. Then after a couple months, just as it felt like it was getting some traction, the server got wiped out accidentally by our server team and there were no backups. I never got around to putting it back up. I hope not having your knowledge base arbitrarily wiped out by careless admins would be a feature of this service.
- cheath 8y ago
  can confirm: that's definitely one of the features of this product.
- Grae 8y ago
  What tool did you use, and would you recommend it? I'm considering that route for project-relevant questions my students have.
  - klenwell 8y ago
    I believe it was this: https://github.com/dzone/osqa https://github.com/dzone/osqa But not positive. I vaguely remember it was a Python product. Not sure I can recommend it. I remember it not being nearly as polished as SO and not sure it's being actively maintained. It's a shame that you can't use Stack Overflow itself constructively for this. I think Stack Overflow usage would be a great lesson for any introductory class. Just teaching new devs how to write a good Stack Overflow question is an invaluable step in problem-solving, even if they never post it. Unfortunately, at the moment, I fear a good part of that lesson would be "the talk" about navigating the tricky culture of Stack Overflow.

tekkk 8y ago

My question is, is this better than your self-hosted wiki? At least that's cheaper and isn't a vendor lock-in. Sure wiki doesn't have the best possible UI and the UX might be too so-and-so. If I were in a position to buy this kind of service I'd still want something more out of it. Maybe if it offered a way to export Slack threads into SO as questions so they wouldn't get lost. Sure you could generate those questions manually from the thread and maybe prune them a little but I've found mostly people are too lazy for extra-work like that. Anyway that's my first impression, take it as you want.

coryfklein 8y ago
Nearly every company I've worked at is already paying for a vendor locked-in wiki. Of course, ADDING StackOverflow means they're now paying for TWO vendor locked-in wikis (at least until they can shut down the old one, if ever), but it may be still be a net improvement.
- jfriend 8y ago
  FWIW, Stack Overflow for Teams isn't a wiki.
  - coryfklein 8y ago
    Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-a-wiki/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...
    - jfriend 8y ago
      That's Joel's version of link bait headline. It works nothing like a wiki. But of course, you already know that if you've used Stack Overflow. But, tomato, tomato.
      - coryfklein 8y ago
        wi·ki noun a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users. StackOverflow is a website that allows users to edit the content of questions, answers, and tags. It also allows users to write new questions, new answers, and close existing questions and answers. How is that "nothing like a wiki"?

krupan 8y ago

Has anyone tried one of the open source clones sich as question2answer? http://www.question2answer.org http://www.question2answer.org

shusson 8y ago

I'm confused by the pricing. Is it $10 a month for up to 10 users and then additional $5 per new user?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cheath 8y ago
Sorry for the confusion. Your assumption is correct. $10 month total for the first 10 users (so, regardless of whether you have 3 users or 9 users, it's still $10/month). And then $5 per new user after that.
- shusson 8y ago
  thanks I know you're probably targeting larger companies but for small teams there's a big difference between $10 a month and $5 per user per month :p
  - cheath 8y ago
    absolutely :)
coryfklein 8y ago
Also they are offering promotional pricing - before July 1st it's $4.15/user.

cryptos 8y ago

Can this be connected to Active Directory?

cheath 8y ago
not yet. but supporting SSO options is on our near-term roadmap. however enterprise edition does support AD/SAML out of the box. stackoverflow.com/enterprise

yehosef 8y ago

This is an interesting play but doesn't seem like a good fit. The examples on the front page: "how do I connect to our database", "what kind of email templates do we have". Are these questions that you're going to get multiple answers for and I'm going to upvote the best and/or select one as the "selected" answer. I would think this would be a sign of dysfunction in most cases. And how does the gamification play into it? (maybe it's a secret bus-factor detector.) It seems like a regular wiki/knowledge base would be a better fit for this kind of knowledge. How would the SO structure help. A related note, I wonder if you can disable the "Soup Nazis"[1] feature or it's too deeply embedded in the psyche of the product. [1]https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php

shusson 8y ago
I think searching and linking to existing questions (internally and externally) would be useful.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  The useful parts you name sound a lot like a wiki.
  - always_good 8y ago
    SO is a wiki. Except that instead of writing aimless documentation, you can document exactly what people are asking about. Which makes it better than just about every wiki I've used at a company or Github repo which just get out of date because they are so arbitrary and unfocused.

cryptos 8y ago

Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" is only half the price. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions

Steltek 8y ago
I'd rather not learn a 9th Atlassian specific markup language. I find JIRA and Confluence to be uncomfortably slow, even on high end hardware. I recall SO took a "scale up" approach but hopefully they can do better.
- Shank 8y ago
  I 100% agree on the speed here. I thought it was just my inability to self host Atlassian products. I tried Atlassian OnDemand and the performance was actually worse compared to self hosting. I legitimately don’t know if I’m just bad a “tuning” their stuff, but JIRA and Confluence in particular were nothing short of miserable to use daily. Bamboo was great, but it had a lot less daily interaction than JIRA, for obvious reasons.
  - farkas 8y ago
    We have recently replatformed Jira and Confluence in Cloud: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/atlassians-two-year-cloud-journey/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/atlassians-two-year-cloud-... I'd encourage you to take a look again.
coryfklein 8y ago
"Questions for Confluence" surely benefits from its synergy with other Atlassian products, but it's not clear to what extent. Auto-linking of Jira tickets numbers? Unfortunately for folks like me down in the trenches, the manager types typically have more sway when it comes to picking products like this. Expanding the Atlassian license to include one more product probably sounds much easier to them. However, the $1.65 per user difference in price is likely not going to be a deal breaker for these decision makers if it can be shown that StackOverflow, the clear dominant player in Q&A, has a superior product.

baud147258 8y ago

Do you think we'll get the "closed as primarly opinion-based" flag squad on SO for Teams too?

coryfklein 8y ago
Actually this brings up one of the things I like the most about this SO for Teams idea - it could also be used as a sort of slant.co substitute, where a large dev team is trying to settle on a common programming language or persistence framework, and each person can register their opinion or vote on an existing one. After N days, the whole group decides to select the option with the most votes. Since voting is anonymous, everyone can give their honest opinion, or even vote for multiple. If you don't like the "opinion-based" close reason, you can just not use it on your team.
- baud147258 8y ago
  It was a weak joke concerning the usual complaints about SO and because I thought it was an on-premise offer, not integrated in the main SO site. As said below, there's no flagging in SO Teams. If you need anonymous voting for decision concerning language/framework, I think you have a big problem: it would mean individuals are afraid of voicing their opinions regarding a technical choice and that's not something that can just be solved with a tool.
KyleBrandt 8y ago
Currently the only close reason available inside Teams is "Close as Duplicate". There also currently is no flagging inside a Team.

Clanan 8y ago

I'm sure I'm ignorant of other reasonable options, but this one is quite appealing as a small co, even if only used by one person. Just yesterday I was thinking about better ways to store easy-to-find answers to those dang tech issues that pop up once every six months. "How do I install pip manually on OS X with xyz constraints?"

EGreg 8y ago

Why use this when Discourse is free? It is an open source product that lets you store all the data in your own database. And it’s by the same guys, too.

coryfklein 8y ago
Because Discourse is a message board, not a Q&A site? Not bashing Discourse at all. In fact I wish I saw it in the wild more often.
- EGreg 8y ago
  A forum is nearly there. With open source, all you need is a third party plugin to turn it into what you want: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer-plugin/30155 https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answe...
  - coryfklein 8y ago
    That plugin hardly turns Discourse into a full fledged Q&A site. It merely adds a button to mark a specific post as "The Answer". While that may be sufficient for many, there is a reason that StackOverflow has tags, tailored search, reputation, closing, etc. That's what they are selling with that $5 price tag.
    - EGreg 8y ago
      Discourse has tags, tailored search, badges, closing, and with this you can mark the right answer. But you can’t have voting up and cute Q&A related badges, true. And reputation is also tricky. But for many people, being able to own their own database for free will trump those things.
    - Can_Not 8y ago
      It's funny you refute that forum add-on, as it is a good add-on, but it's also just an add-on. A band-aid, not a solution. Too often I see the selected answer "pulled up" to the top, but it's actually just the tail-end of a longer conversation, where the context of the conversation is critical to understanding the answer itself. Not to mention that comment responses (to both answers and the question itself) are interwoven together like a big bowl of spaghetti. Meanwhile, I think StackOverflow, while great, is not living up to it's potential. I'm currently brainstorming/prototyping a StackOverflow alternative that covers the Q&A scenario, but adds support for more advanced features. If a question is opinion based, then you could have answers categorized into sides. Yes or No would be a common example. React vs VueJS vs Ember could be some side options in a question. OOP vs FP vs Procedural could be sides for another question. What is the right way to X can have a different answer depending on your "side", or it could be that the sides themselves are in disagreement. Sometimes it's nice to see and understand why another side prefers X. Let both side's top answers stand side by side at the top. Another idea is improved connecting of similar, but unmergable, questions. Another idea to connect questions by dependencies. A user could select some premises before asking, debates could be derailed less often by linking debunked arguements to their open debate page where there could be a large chain of custody on each element and nested prerequisite showing why it's wrong. Prerequisite could also be a word definition ("theory" is a random shower thought in some contexts, but in other contexts it's an explanation backed by so much evidence it's a strong candidate for established fact that could only be replaced by an expanded explaination, not an alternative one). Prerequisites could also be an axiom. In addition to questions, there could also be "claims". "Answers" to claims would basically be supporting evidence or refuting evidence.

vortico 8y ago

>team member has been fired for posting off-topic question

tarr11 8y ago

So much of the core mechanics of SO relies on SEO and a community of volunteer moderators, neither if which really exist in a corporation. I suppose if a company had a paid librarian function, this could be successful. But in that case, even a normal wiki would probably work. I seem to remember an article from Joel or Jeff many years ago describing why this exact model won't work. Can't seem to find it now though.

parvenu74 8y ago

Seems like "yet another tool to try to offset the problem of requirements, code, and architectural decisions not being adequately documented for future staff to understand." Sometimes I wonder if software teams should add technical writers embed with developers, architects, QA, and BA assets to actually document All The Things and keep documentation up to date. Yes, that will mean re-writing documentations as people change their minds in response to business needs but it would provide an historical record that answers "How the hell did our systems end up looking like this?" which seems to plague every organization that hires programmers to write custom code. Sometimes it's hard to give the developers who wrote the code the benefit of the doubt that they made the wisest decision based on all known variables at the time. I'm certainly guilty of questioning the intelligence, breeding, motivations, etc of the programmer of an app I had to modify once... only to realize that I had written the code in question four years previously. Eventually I remembered why the feature had to be coded that way and wrote a 1200 word comment section explaining why the feature was written the way it was and how one should orient their state of mind to understand and edit the logic. And I further apologized for the clusterfuck of code that the feature was and left my personal email address in case a future programmer wanted to berate me for it. And three years later I did get an email from someone saying they had been laughing for ten minutes because they had gone from "WTF?" to gradual understanding as they read through my verbose description of why... ending with laughter that I was willing to take whatever vitriol they had left over via email so they could vent and get back to work. Whether that dev updated the comments to reflect their changes is something to which I have no answer.

organsnyder 8y ago
For the past few weeks, I've been digging into a codebase that is legendary among my team for its complexity. While I have disagreements over some architectural choices, the biggest pain point has been the lack of documentation: when I look up the JIRA story referenced in the git commit, it's often a 4-pointer (the highest value we use before we break stories up) with no context. I found one story that had EIGHT pull requests linked to it, and all that was documented was "modify {entity}". This code base is not even two years old, and I'm already concerned about its long-term viability. The colleagues that worked on it are extremely helpful, but details are fading from their memories over time. Its one saving grace is the fairly extensive test suite, so at least I have some degree of confidence that I won't be breaking things whenever I look at it the wrong way.

colshrapnel 8y ago

Stack Overflow largely relies on Google Search, but for private teams it won't be available. And internal search is just unreliable. Also I fail to see how answers on SO for Teams are supposed to be less "stale" than your old wiki articles. For me, at least our corporate wiki is more organized, without duplicates, whereas Stack Overflow's modus operandi is largely relies on creating thousands of duplicated questions.

gchp 8y ago

An open source alternative I've used in the past is Askbot: https://askbot.com/ https://askbot.com/ It's built on Django, and covers all of the standard Q&A features that I've needed to use.

mikhailt 8y ago
Site doesn't work, refuses to connect. Adding www. tells me it is an invalid cert.

baud147258 8y ago

Joel wrote a blog post about it, detailing how it currently works: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-overflow-for-teams/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-o... It was already linked on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985574

Kiro 8y ago

I want to create a public Stack Overflow, just using the engine but rebranded as my own QA site.

privacypoller 8y ago
They used to do something similar to this, but then co-opted all the popular sites and shut down the rest. They had a parenting one that was pretty successful - probably because Jon Skeet was prolific on that one as well.

nkg 8y ago

I have thought about building this so many times. I think there is a need for it, particularly for non-technical teams where processes don't evolve that fast, but adoption will be hard to ignite.

pugworthy 8y ago
Agreed - this is for many kinds of people, not just technical people.

british_india 8y ago

Stack Overflow: home of bullies, assholes and trolls.

bluedino 8y ago

There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.

tootie 8y ago
I think the win would be in making the answers more findable. Confluence is great for writing documents and laying out pages in a hierarchy, but full-text search is still very hit and miss. Especially when you have 50 projects that all have the same keywords and 49 of them are irrelevant.
- gregmac 8y ago
  Or one person calls it "SomeTitle" and someone else only uses "Some Title" and search has no concept those are the same thing.
- htaoerth29th 8y ago
  > Confluence is great for writing documents Citation needed. I use it almost daily and it's essentially write-only and pretty unusably so at that.
  - falcor84 8y ago
    >> Confluence is great for writing documents >... it's essentially write-only Seems like there's no disagreement here :) Anyway, as I see it, as someone who has written quite enough if it, most software documentation is write-only 99% of the time; but it is occasionally very handy to have that documentation written by the original developers when shit really hits the fan.
some_account 8y ago
Even if they read, it gets old really fast usually and who have to update it? You. So now you have two problems :)

Shank 8y ago

So the biggest reason why I can see this succeeding is because of onboarding. In fact, I'd say that's the killer feature. It takes one person going through a development environment setup process to be really useful. They'll ask a lot of questions, get the answers...and then the setup process is suddenly really well documented without anyone having to go through the trouble of documenting it without knowing what to document. Since new employees are expected to ask questions on how to get things working, using SO for Teams is natural. Then, explanations that would normally be sent in pieces over IM can be recorded. The information still ages, but aged information on the right track is infinitely better than nothing at all.

amelius 8y ago

How easy is it to migrate your data out of it and into something else?

jpitz 8y ago
This was essentially my first question - who owns the data?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

Continuously surprised at the lack of basecamp in these conversations. Seems like still the best tool to me.

rwilsonperkin 8y ago

We've been running this in beta for a couple months now, happy to answer questions about it. The SO team has been super helpful during the process.

Someone1234 8y ago
Roughly how many programmers do you have? What difficult has it been to get people to participate (on either end of the scale)?
- rwilsonperkin 8y ago
  About 50 programmers, yes we've found that it wasn't natural for people to start asking their questions there and that we (the team that opened the beta) tend to seed Q&A there to drive people to the tool.
nwsm 8y ago
What did you have in place before this (wiki, Slack, Yammer or something like it) if anything? Is this better than finding the right person to ask, or posting in slack or something? In my org we have a wiki on topics and if that fails an "experts" list with people to contact for further help. There is also a yammer group for asking questions, but that is rarely used. I think this could be helpful, but whether or not it's worth the cost would be a question for someone else.
- rwilsonperkin 8y ago
  Our documentation is split up between markdown files in-repo and a wiki (Confluence) with lots of assorted information. Interestingly we do the same kind of thing with an "experts" list, but with a focus for on-call engineers so they know who to contact if something's broken. A lot of people still have a natural inclination to just post their questions in chat - probably because it's lower friction than typing up a question and then posting that in chat. We've been trying to shift this by re-posting people's questions in SO and answering them there. It's been mostly helpful, but I'd say we still have a ways to go in shifting people towards SO.

pknerd 8y ago

At least the frequency of questions getting closed without any sane reason will be lesser than Stackoverflow.com

dandigangi 8y ago

Totally misread the title and thought it was for "Teens". LOL

mathgeek 8y ago
The concept of "Stack Overflow for Teens" seems like a parody goldmine.

pugworthy 8y ago

I think it's a mistake to look at this from the perspective of software developers. It's called "Teams" because it's for teams - which can be anything from software developers to facilities maintenance people. It's for teams that have questions (and answers), not for software developers who have questions (and answers). By way of experience with this, we run an internally written Stack Overflow clone of sorts for a large industrial printing product we make. It's meant for people in our organization who have questions and are looking for answers. And as such, there are no "wrong" questions. For example, someone might ask, "I'm traveling to the San Diego site - what's the most convenient hotel to stay at?", and create a new tag for "san-diego", "recommendations", and "hotels". Or they might post about "Top-of-form mark detected too close to the previous frame" using tags like "print-engine" and "top-of-form". For us, both types of questions are very valid and "on topic" questions to post in our internal stack. When we first launched our stack, we imagined it as being a kind of "crowd sourced internal knowledge capture" tool. But a real evolution in our thinking has occurred, and we've found that most people use it to post questions and answers at the same time. In other words, they've solved a problem and want to share the solution. And SO's "question/problem statement" followed by "answer/solution" template and framework makes it very easy for them to share this knowledge. Contrast with a wiki for example, where they are presented with a blank page and told to "document this issue". One feature we are considering is the idea of wizards for certain types of posts. For example, if you are posting an answer about equipment work that requires opening electrical panels, we probably should have a warning about only doing this if you are certified for it. So the wizard idea might say, "Is this a solution that relates to electrical safety?" Checking yes automatically appends some boilerplate text with a caution about electrical certification. We've also found that the voting up/down feature isn't that useful. People just don't do that voting stuff, nor do they really care about their reputation. What we are going to do is replace the vote system with a simple, "Did this answer help you?" type approach. It's literally the same thing, but with a different way of asking it. Because we don't actually do "down" votes, a "Yes" is a vote up, and a "No" prompts the user to post a comment explaining why it didn't help them, assuming it was what they were looking for. Was the answer not clear? Was it wrong? Did it not work? Is the information out of date? This kind of feedback (via comments) will help answer authors evolve their content to be better.

sdsdsdsdsdsds 8y ago

Slightly offtopic, I recently looked at all top free internet websites/services that I use and wondered which of them I would miss if advertising dollars dry up. For me, it turned out to be stackoverflow and Google. I truly hope stackoverflow is a profitable venture at this point. I hope they have been trying various avenues to make money but no o no one has any info on profitability. Job ads pay well, but there is fierce competition there.

makecheck 8y ago

Over the years I’ve concluded, reluctantly, that the ONLY documentation solutions that matter are the code, revision control logs and issue trackers. Create massive comment blocks to explain things if you have to but put it all there in the code, next to the things that matter. Then it has half a chance of still being accurate. And, you know exactly where the documentation is. If the code becomes obsolete and is removed, you naturally strip out documentation that is no longer relevant at the same time. Revision control log messages are important. I so hate lazy messages; if you change 5 files in random ways and your message is “fixed bug”, I think you should be fired. If it’s in the issue tracker, your log had better mention the number. Add a paragraph daring to explain what the hell you did so I can read a sensible log history and figure out what happened when. Issue trackers are useful for capturing every relevant detail, especially new information that is found while the bug is being investigated. The bug might come up again, and details can help to sort it out.

sametmax 8y ago
How do you fit deployment doc in code ? And tutorials ? General graphs of the architecture ? Because an API reference is a very poor doc.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  Ideally your deployments are code. And tutorials are part of your website 'code', or integrated into your project (and thus 'code'). General graphs of the architecture would be docs in your code repo (and thus 'code' too). I'll admit tho that it's pretty sensible to just not consider some of those as 'code' and thus conclude that documentation outside of the code is important too. But the original commenter is also probably right that 'second hand' documentation is probably the least accurate.
- makecheck 8y ago
  These documents are still things that can become out of date. Anything of this nature can be in a source file somewhere, even if it’s a giant overview comment in one of the main files. I do think it’s fine to create pretty docs from source comments or generate pictures from graph descriptions, etc. Every generated page should clearly state where it came from though (e.g. revision number and date). Frankly I don’t like having only an API doc without the implementation. Code should be open-source to those using it, under NDA if necessary. When I need to rely on hidden implementations from Apple, etc. I routinely have to waste time discovering things simply not working as described. Meaning, their pretty docs are out of sync with reality and it wastes significant time to find this out the hard way.

Johnny555 8y ago

"Rest easy knowing that your Team’s data is secured in a dedicated network and logically separated into its own SQL schema. Learn more about our security policy. " If its using logical separation on a shared SQL server, then is it really a "dedicated network"?

nwsm 8y ago

I'm not sure if it's worth it, but this struck a chord with me: >No more digging through stale wikis

cwyers 8y ago

I feel like holding out single sign-on for a separate Enterprise tier priced at "Contact a sale rep for details!" is a mistake. Heck, I feel like any "contact a sales rep for details!" pricing tier is a mistake.

pugworthy 8y ago

Pushing my message again, but if you've not done so in a while, visit https://stackexchange.com/sites# https://stackexchange.com/sites# and look at how many utterly non-technical topics are covered by this model. The application of the system is about far more than just traditional software development.

tracker1 8y ago

Was anyone else hoping to see a Stack Overflow plugin for "Microsoft Teams"? That would have been very cool.