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Comment by kenward | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

I suppose the question was about the Q&A plugin for Confluence, not the Wiki product itself (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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