Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up to 50 users(stackoverflow.blog)
stackoverflow.blog
Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up to 50 users
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/17/stack-overflow-for-teams-is-now-free-forever-for-up-to-50-users/
55 comments
I've not been happy with Slack search.
Slack in general is a black hole, which is its main redeeming feature.
Things just dissappear, and people understand it's a lossy channel. Several times I look at my phone, see some notifications, I glance at them and try to make a mental note to reply, then when I get to work those messages are gone, buried in the chat stream since they have been seen on my phone. There isn't even a way to view all your past notifications in slack, or all the notifications you got in the last 24 hours. At least I don't know of a way to do that -- perhaps some of the slackers here can point it out.
Once you get used to it and set expectations that this isn't email but shouting into a crowd, then you can regain some productivity. "Sorry, didn't see that, I must have scrolled past it." :)
Slack in general is a black hole, which is its main redeeming feature.
Things just dissappear, and people understand it's a lossy channel. Several times I look at my phone, see some notifications, I glance at them and try to make a mental note to reply, then when I get to work those messages are gone, buried in the chat stream since they have been seen on my phone. There isn't even a way to view all your past notifications in slack, or all the notifications you got in the last 24 hours. At least I don't know of a way to do that -- perhaps some of the slackers here can point it out.
Once you get used to it and set expectations that this isn't email but shouting into a crowd, then you can regain some productivity. "Sorry, didn't see that, I must have scrolled past it." :)
If I can believe what I've been seeing in our internal support channel, no one uses the slack search feature and keep asking the same questions over and over, I really see a space fo SO for Teams to fix this internal knowledge sharing issue.
What makes you think that people not using the Slack search function will use the SO for Teams search function?
We are working on having a bot come up with results to stackoverflow/documentation based on the questions being asked. If it finds a “good” match, reply with the top X results.
Couldn't you also just hook this up to Slack search and include relevant threads into the results as well?
If we were using slack we could indeed. Instead we are using teams, matter most, a custom product/docs/faq site, confluence, and stackoverflow enterprise. So we want a place to consolidate the search.
[deleted]
Slack is paid for every team (small or big). Search does not work if using a lot #random and #general because knowledge left on other channels disappear
Is there any big reason to use Stack Overflow For Teams now that version control providers (github, gitlab) have discussions?
Could you elaborate about the Gitlab discussion features? I know they can be threaded, but a nice advantage of SO is being able to upvote solutions (which may be edited for clarity), so we don't have to read through pages of comments. I am missing anything?
Not sure about Gitlab discussions, but you can upvote answers on GitHub discussions. I'm sure GitHub discussions going free for private repos was a big driver for this move by StackOverflow - for us though, the fact that GitHub discussions can sit alongside the repo they're actually about, with automatic linking to commits and tickets makes them infinitely more useful than SO for Teams.
Familiarity? I've never used GitHub discussions, I use SO all the time.
I have looked into SO for Teams in the past, but was not able to convince myself that it was worth the effort to push for its adoption (from the bottom up). I would be curious to hear more about what the journey to success looked like for organizations that were able to do it successfully.
It seemed to me that it required a lot of process/habit changing that needs to be fully supported from management levels. Likely including a "ban" on project-based channels on things like Slack/Teams/etc. I imagined you would need to try to move all of the relevant project-based Q/A and chat onto this product so the necessary information is available. Then you need people to actively moderate and vote to help the SO search functionality bubble up the relevant topics. Basically, this isn't just a new tool, but a new way of interacting with teammates - if you want to get the utility from it. What else am I missing?
I should mention, I really like the concept, but not sure how to get over the adoption hurdle.
It seemed to me that it required a lot of process/habit changing that needs to be fully supported from management levels. Likely including a "ban" on project-based channels on things like Slack/Teams/etc. I imagined you would need to try to move all of the relevant project-based Q/A and chat onto this product so the necessary information is available. Then you need people to actively moderate and vote to help the SO search functionality bubble up the relevant topics. Basically, this isn't just a new tool, but a new way of interacting with teammates - if you want to get the utility from it. What else am I missing?
I should mention, I really like the concept, but not sure how to get over the adoption hurdle.
This analysis is so similar to my own thoughts on it, I had to double-check that I didn't write it in a past life.
Obviously, there are a ton of questions which happen every day in a typical company. The problem is, SO is really optimized for a very particular kind of question: I'll word them as, isolated/fungible questions which have a medium-level effort of answering.
By that I mean, firstly, the question has to be isolated from any other workflow a developer might be involved in, which involves other systems. The big ones here are Issue Management (Jira) and Code (Github). I'd estimate that 70% of the questions our developers ask one-another on a daily basis happens either in the planning phase on Jira, or in the PR phase on Github. Not only would it be burdensome to tell developers "stop asking questions in PRs, put those in SO", I'm not convinced that, idealistically, SO is even where those questions should live; Jira and GitHub are powerful, indexed, searchable tools that both have a tactile connection to the actual product. It makes sense for discussion to happen there.
And secondly; short-form questions are better answered in Chat (Slack); its where people live, and its fast. Yes/no kind of stuff. Long-form questions will always be better answered in Slack via a link to a Wiki (Confluence/Notion); there's a hierarchical organization to Wikis, not to mention full search indexing, which massively assists in organizing and archiving information. No company does their knowledge base right, but usually they're better than nothing, and better than what I could imagine a full-usage internal StackOverflow would be.
I could honestly see it being interesting as a replacement to Chat/Slack in very, very modern companies whose leadership has recognized how much of a massive time waster and burden real-time Chat has become to the development workflow. But this is very cutting edge thinking; I know of a few leaders who have verbalized concern about Slack, but none who have actually followed through on trying something different in any capacity, likely because it is addicting and their teams would revolt. I would like to work somewhere that just tries it out; throw away Slack for three months, and try a more Forum-based method of low-friction communication. Maybe SO would work for that. But that will never, ever happen bottom-up.
Obviously, there are a ton of questions which happen every day in a typical company. The problem is, SO is really optimized for a very particular kind of question: I'll word them as, isolated/fungible questions which have a medium-level effort of answering.
By that I mean, firstly, the question has to be isolated from any other workflow a developer might be involved in, which involves other systems. The big ones here are Issue Management (Jira) and Code (Github). I'd estimate that 70% of the questions our developers ask one-another on a daily basis happens either in the planning phase on Jira, or in the PR phase on Github. Not only would it be burdensome to tell developers "stop asking questions in PRs, put those in SO", I'm not convinced that, idealistically, SO is even where those questions should live; Jira and GitHub are powerful, indexed, searchable tools that both have a tactile connection to the actual product. It makes sense for discussion to happen there.
And secondly; short-form questions are better answered in Chat (Slack); its where people live, and its fast. Yes/no kind of stuff. Long-form questions will always be better answered in Slack via a link to a Wiki (Confluence/Notion); there's a hierarchical organization to Wikis, not to mention full search indexing, which massively assists in organizing and archiving information. No company does their knowledge base right, but usually they're better than nothing, and better than what I could imagine a full-usage internal StackOverflow would be.
I could honestly see it being interesting as a replacement to Chat/Slack in very, very modern companies whose leadership has recognized how much of a massive time waster and burden real-time Chat has become to the development workflow. But this is very cutting edge thinking; I know of a few leaders who have verbalized concern about Slack, but none who have actually followed through on trying something different in any capacity, likely because it is addicting and their teams would revolt. I would like to work somewhere that just tries it out; throw away Slack for three months, and try a more Forum-based method of low-friction communication. Maybe SO would work for that. But that will never, ever happen bottom-up.
Has anyone used this service? Could you tell me how it differs from Confluence (or similar)?
We used an early version at Uber; I was one of the few people to help set it up in the early days.
It's literally just SO format, but for internal stuff. It's great for when you have siloed teams that have to communicate, especially when you've never met those people. It makes a lot of sense at these large companies, since Uber is just a bunch of small, isolated teams mashed together in large open floor plans. Nobody actually knows each other unless you've worked directly with them or they're notable management.
So for that, it was great (when I was there). I can't imagine this being useful for smaller teams.
Confluence is more long-form, wiki-like documentation, often written by someone with authoritative knowledge. While this isn't forbidden (quite the contrary) on SO or SO for Teams, it's not exactly what it's most useful for in my opinion.
It's literally just SO format, but for internal stuff. It's great for when you have siloed teams that have to communicate, especially when you've never met those people. It makes a lot of sense at these large companies, since Uber is just a bunch of small, isolated teams mashed together in large open floor plans. Nobody actually knows each other unless you've worked directly with them or they're notable management.
So for that, it was great (when I was there). I can't imagine this being useful for smaller teams.
Confluence is more long-form, wiki-like documentation, often written by someone with authoritative knowledge. While this isn't forbidden (quite the contrary) on SO or SO for Teams, it's not exactly what it's most useful for in my opinion.
I suppose the question was about the Q&A plugin for Confluence, not the Wiki product itself (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)
How easy was it to find answers? Is it just the stackoverflow search engine?
Yes. All SO, but with our "internal" content.
Some of the most awesome engineers contributed a lot, which made it pretty high quality.
You could also ping a person when asking a question, that's usually more polite than pinging over chat with your question.
Some high-touch teams (e.g. software networking, with whom almost everybody has something to say/ask) set up their "how to ask us a question" to post on internal slack. Works great.
Edit: also keeps people more honest when asking questions - SO taught us to ask questions correctly. :)
Current Uber employee
Some of the most awesome engineers contributed a lot, which made it pretty high quality.
You could also ping a person when asking a question, that's usually more polite than pinging over chat with your question.
Some high-touch teams (e.g. software networking, with whom almost everybody has something to say/ask) set up their "how to ask us a question" to post on internal slack. Works great.
Edit: also keeps people more honest when asking questions - SO taught us to ask questions correctly. :)
Current Uber employee
Just out of curiosity, did you guys move all of your internal docs stuff to SO? I'm surprised it's still being used, I was the first mod for it and it wasn't clear if people cared. There were like 4 main KB softwares in use and a few of us wanted to push to use SO primarily. How well did that plan end up?
Really interested to learn more about how Uber scaled like that. Would you be ok if I emailed you? I’ve been thinking hard about growing teams lately - would love to pick your brain.
Full disclosure, I work for Stack Overflow.
The product is different from wikis or intranets because it's not just about anticipating what someone might need and documenting that. Stack Overflow for Teams gives users the ability to ask a question and people can ask teammates to add knowledge to the platform right in chat. So knowledge itself can be either proactively added, meaning people are anticipating needs, or it can be reactively added, based on an immediate need, like a question.
For your search question - it has basic and advanced search capabilities. You can read more about that here.
https://stackoverflow.help/en/articles/4400196-search-existi...
If you want to read about how it compares to using version control, Confluence, or wikis, there is a case study on switching from those tools here.
https://info.stackoverflowsolutions.com/Enterprise_Elastic-C...
The product is different from wikis or intranets because it's not just about anticipating what someone might need and documenting that. Stack Overflow for Teams gives users the ability to ask a question and people can ask teammates to add knowledge to the platform right in chat. So knowledge itself can be either proactively added, meaning people are anticipating needs, or it can be reactively added, based on an immediate need, like a question.
For your search question - it has basic and advanced search capabilities. You can read more about that here.
https://stackoverflow.help/en/articles/4400196-search-existi...
If you want to read about how it compares to using version control, Confluence, or wikis, there is a case study on switching from those tools here.
https://info.stackoverflowsolutions.com/Enterprise_Elastic-C...
I just want to say that this sounds like a really interesting product. Have you all considered making questions "publishable" in a way to public SO?
Plenty of times where a smaller company has a ton of internal knowledge that really needs to be on a public SO as they are common questions. It would be incredible to say, we'll let internal users ask questions here and then populate a public set of tags based on that for new/emerging products.
Plenty of times where a smaller company has a ton of internal knowledge that really needs to be on a public SO as they are common questions. It would be incredible to say, we'll let internal users ask questions here and then populate a public set of tags based on that for new/emerging products.
Great question. It's a feature request that comes up sometimes, but doing it by accident could be costly if we're talking about proprietary code.
Having it in this format should make it easy to port Q&A over to the public site if a Team decides to make a certain project visible or open source.
Having it in this format should make it easy to port Q&A over to the public site if a Team decides to make a certain project visible or open source.
Honest response: whenever I read "Great question" (followed either by a full stop or exclamation mark(worse)) my mind goes to "bullshit marketing speak follows" mode. Especially when the answerer disclosed their affinity to the entity in question, in this case stackoverflow.
I have to work hard against this impulse to continue reading the actual answer.
I have to work hard against this impulse to continue reading the actual answer.
Thats fair, I'm just thinking for companies that back OSS projects. It can be hard to get those questions seeded even though they have been asked and answered a thousand times with their customers and internally by new hires.
At a glance I couldn't find anything on IP rights. Do users retain full right on the content? Which permissions do users give SO in regards to content they host there and in which ways and for what purposes will SO use that content?
I used internal stackoverflow at Uber. Honestly, not super great. (even though it is great on paper)
the search function is bad and I end up using it a lot less. (and often can find better answers on slack)
I think to make SO useful, you need a push from the leadership layer to have all the questions be posted on SO and answered on SO. If you don't push for more questions to be answered on SO, then slack is often better source of Q&A.
And you probably need to maintain and trim the answers (since internal APIs / issues change a lot more rapidly and some answers can become stale quickly)
Basically, not a slam dunk straight away but I can imagine that it is a good idea
the search function is bad and I end up using it a lot less. (and often can find better answers on slack)
I think to make SO useful, you need a push from the leadership layer to have all the questions be posted on SO and answered on SO. If you don't push for more questions to be answered on SO, then slack is often better source of Q&A.
And you probably need to maintain and trim the answers (since internal APIs / issues change a lot more rapidly and some answers can become stale quickly)
Basically, not a slam dunk straight away but I can imagine that it is a good idea
For me the major advantage of SO Teams/Enterprise is the actually working search combined with it searching for similar questions when writing the title of your questions. As an SME I also appreciate the different queues, although at some scale the questions just become too much, then you actually know you need to improve other things like documentation or marketing.
For a service like this, I only care about about the search feature. Will it be like the google->stack overflow experience?
I guess SO for Teams wasn't very successful then so far.
There's just so much out there and this is yet another knowledge based system.
Also, for smaller teams (say, under 50 people), there probably isn't enough value over a wiki and slack/teams.
Also, for smaller teams (say, under 50 people), there probably isn't enough value over a wiki and slack/teams.
I was in an organization of 50-100 engineers and we tried several similar systems, but they turned out to be little more than "FAQs" where half the questions were "fake" questions that were preemptively "asked" and answered by the same team. Only on a few rare occasions do I remember multiple people collaborating to address something using the systems. It was rare for an answer or question to get more than 1-2 up votes. There just were not enough people, and people were too busy "doing their job."
I suspect it is more that they think they figured out how to set the different paid tiers for this. I don't remember the details, but there seem to be more differentiating features for the tiers now than when they started it.
Interestingly enough, there is an internal debate right now on SO about how to handle outdated answers [1].
I've never used Teams but I can already imagine how the same problem applies to Teams too. I guess it's even worst because technical answers usually get outdated after several years, but in every company I worked, processes usually changed every 2-6 months.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-...
I've never used Teams but I can already imagine how the same problem applies to Teams too. I guess it's even worst because technical answers usually get outdated after several years, but in every company I worked, processes usually changed every 2-6 months.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-...
The word "forever" should be illegal to use for marketing purposes.
Agreed. It's one of the only axiomatically false marketing claims.
"Unlimited" storage/data is in that category if not for bandwidth/throttling disclaimers.
"Unlimited" storage/data is in that category if not for bandwidth/throttling disclaimers.
If you can't prove the halting problem, how can you disprove forever? :)
Yep, I have "Unlimited" cell data but it throttles to 128Kbps after 4GB. If I were to blow through the entire 4 instantly at the beginning of the month I'd only be able to reach 48GB by continuously maxing out my bandwidth until the end of the month. I know people who regularly go over that with "real" unlimited plans.
Forever*
* = Terms and conditions may apply.
* = Terms and conditions may apply.
I used to contribute to Stack Overflow, and even answered some questions about software that I wrote and maintain, but then SO removed OpenID, and since then I can’t log in to my account anymore.
They talked about this sort of on the podcast recently. Their login process is exceptionally complicated because originally they didn't have accounts of their own, they'd only allow external authentication providers. Then they rolled their own local accounts. And they need to facilitate resetting a password but don't necessarily know which provider you want to use when you "reset". Is it a local account? Is it an external provider? You can have multiple external providers linked to the same account. Which one do you want to reset? They can't do the reset either, all they can do is point you to where you can.
There was more. But it's a real rat's nest of complexity it sounds like.
There was more. But it's a real rat's nest of complexity it sounds like.
Would this be useful for an academic research group?
Full disclosure, I work for Stack Overflow.
Yes, we think so. We have academic clients using it at computer science departments.
You can see how data scientists use it here https://stackoverflow.com/teams/use-cases/data-analytics
Yes, we think so. We have academic clients using it at computer science departments.
You can see how data scientists use it here https://stackoverflow.com/teams/use-cases/data-analytics
I’m intrigued. I’m trying to develop my own Q&A software for client questionnaires in the investment management industry as the industry solutions charge too much ($10,000 per year). Could be a great market for SO to tap and I’m going to consider SO for our work
What I fear the most with SOTeams is that valuable knowledge may end up confined in company-limited silos. Not only it's not widely accessible, but also can go away for ever if the company ditches the service :/
Has the pricing for any of the other plans been adjusted as well?
No, about that they just enriched the Basic plan to now include a single sign-on (SSO) without changing the current price.
From what I experienced, there is no place for SO for Teams where I worked (even if it's a very well designed tool). Either your question is broad and SO is the place to ask, or it's narrow and domain-based then you should store that knowledge somewhere else than on SO for Teams. Regarding where to ask the question in the first place: Slack channels, leading to a Zoom meeting if necessary.
The last scenario I see, which is the "one-time question which might become a recurring question": it is also handled by Slack (good-enough search). And that's the n°1 problem I had with SO for Teams: Slack is good enough, especially if members of your org take the opportunity of such questions to improve the codebase/documentation/internal knowledge base when necessary.