Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up to 50 users

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.

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

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." :)

Familiarity? I've never used GitHub discussions, I use SO all the time.

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?

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.

"At least until the company is acquired by a tech giant."

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.

For a service like this, I only care about about the search feature. Will it be like the google->stack overflow experience?

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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."

It's like a permanent widget on the side of the site, it's been there for a few years now.

Agreed. It's one of the only axiomatically false marketing claims.

"Unlimited" storage/data is in that category if not for bandwidth/throttling disclaimers.

Forever*

* = Terms and conditions may apply.

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.

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

No, about that they just enriched the Basic plan to now include a single sign-on (SSO) without changing the current price.