10 ms·

StackOverflow for private teams in beta

113 points by davnicwil 9y ago

davnicwil 9y ago
I had a side project which was basically this (at least this was my [company] for [x] summary of the project) a couple of years ago. I always wondered why StackOverflow weren't doing it, and after years of wondering this I just built it myself. I tried to publicise it a bit (not a lot, in fairness) and didn't generate much buzz. I even speculatively applied to YC with it, with the beta written and running, and got no call for an interview even. After that I lost enthusiasm for the idea, and moved on to other things. Seeing this has reminded me of it. What do people think of this? Useful product? Would you pay for it?
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  I think it's very cool, especially for large teams at big companies, but I'm not sure I can see my company using it. They seem to prefer home-grown solutions for lessons learned and other knowledge bases, because there is inevitably some special feature that someone considers necessary. Then, of course, you end up with huge exported spreadsheets in every single workflow. sigh
- siegecraft 9y ago
  It's a useful product. I'm actually surprised that the state of Stack Overflow clones isn't better. Although much of the value of SO comes from its knowledge base, the UI and organization and administration is nice to have pre-built. When I was looking around the top choices among open source/free were askbot (https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel) and osqa (https://github.com/dzone/osqa https://github.com/dzone/osqa). There was also a plug-in for Confluence (Questions) and Answerhub (seemed to be the pro/paid version of OSQA). But none of them were as nice as stack overflow, which was surprising to me.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  It's a vitamin, not a painkiller. Thus it will most likely succeed if a huge brand launches it like StackOverFlow.
- zerkten 9y ago
  Q&A tools (or features for existing community/collaboration tools) are an common request in the enterprise space. Virtually every large organization has some kind of knowledge manager either trying to build, or manage tools for this sort of thing. It's hard to understand why you didn't get a response without more context.
azhenley 9y ago
This has already existed in the form of Stack Overflow Enterprise [1]. One major difference is that the company I was at managed and maintained their instance of Stack Overflow (it involved a lot of work). I wonder what else is different (or maybe this is just a replacement for Enterprise?) [1] https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise
- cheath 9y ago
  It's very similar to Enterprise. The big difference is that for Enterprise you need to have a big enough user base to sustain a community. Channels is geared towards smaller orgs, with more hooks to get Qs answered and built into the core stackoverflow.com experience.
- davnicwil 9y ago
  When was this launched?
  - azhenley 9y ago
    It has been around since at least 2010 [1], and there was a more official release in mid 2013 [2]. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/69436/169404 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/69436/169404 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197549/169404 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197549/169404
  - cheath 9y ago
    We tried it a while ago, but we re-launched it with a much more updated solution about a year and a half ago. And it now has a dedicated ongoing team.
- alexlmiller 9y ago
  For context, I'm the GM of the Enterprise Team at Stack Overflow and have been working on it since we launched our full Enterprise product about 18 months ago. Enterprise is intended for large teams (at least 500 tech staff) who want to have their own completely isolated and standalone Stack Overflow community that can be run on-prem or in a private cloud. Enterprise deployments have full control over the system and also get support from our Customer Success team to build up their community using all the lessons we've learned in 8+ years of building communities. As part of this we have all those features you'd expect like integration with SSO, audibility, massive 50 page contracts, etc Channels on the other hand is meant for smaller teams (all the way down to just 2 people) who want to store their own knowledge (privately and securely) alongside the the public knowledgebase at stackoverflow.com. Any size team will be able to just walk up, put down their credit card and instantly be sharing knowledge with each other. So the two products are very complimentary to each other, just depends on your team size and exactly what you're looking for feature wise.
sklegg 9y ago
Can this do what SharePoint and private wikis can't? My team has tried both with varying degrees of success. In my experience it's always just "easier" for people to pester those who should know the answers.
- rrdharan 9y ago
  Various folks have been looking at Slack as the medium for handling this sort of thing, e.g.: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/niles-is-a-slack-bot-that-learns-your-teams-questions-and-answers-them-so-you-dont-have-to/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/niles-is-a-slack-bot-that-... Slack themselves are trying to tackle this as well of course: https://slack.engineering/search-at-slack-431f8c80619e https://slack.engineering/search-at-slack-431f8c80619e
- brianwawok 9y ago
  Of course. You need to teach this with culture. Come over and ask me something I know is in the wikki? Let's sit down and search the wikki together. No match? Then let's type up a result together and enter it for future use. You can't fix a bad process with a magic app, but a magic app can help a process work much better.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    How many people are that conscientious?
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      The people that would want a wiki program to work? It only takes a few to start a culture.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I mean probably not, unless you can tag people to alert them somehow.
- zerkten 9y ago
  Both of those are much more "free form". You have to put effort in to get some value out. That's before you think of culture, and for it to be the norm for people to use those tools. SO has structure for Q&A which solves the technical issue, but it still doesn't solve the cultural aspect. Does pestering being "easier" reflect a deeper problem? Maybe, maybe not, but in a lot of places people get annoyed having to answer the same question over and over. Committing answers to writing also helps clarify them and avoids someone walking off with institutional knowledge. In theory, that improves things.
borispavlovic 9y ago
There's a viable privately hosted alternative with Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)
- jiaweihli 9y ago
  I looked into this briefly in the past, but it didn't seem viable. Reviews complain about bugginess and pricing: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-questions/cloud/reviews https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.conf... And active development stopped in early 2016: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-questions/versions https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.conf...
Hernanpm 9y ago
My team uses http://flarum.org/ http://flarum.org/ for the same purpose we even added a slack notification plugin when new questions are added.
- lloydde 9y ago
  What were some of your deciding factors? Does that forum software have modules or configurations that make it effective as a Q&A focused site? How does Flarum compare to say Discourse?
captainmuon 9y ago
This would be great for CERN. We do a lot of software development, but most of it is very bespoke, and you are often not going to get an answer on stackoverflow. Also there are confidentially requirements (it would be great if you could tag a post e.g. ATLAS-internal, CMS-internal, and then only people from your experiment could see that post). We probably have tens of thousands of members, so I think we have the critical size needed for such a project. Finally, I can see it not only used for programming, but also for physics, statistics, analysis questions in general. Currently, we are mostly using old school mailing lists, and it can be hard to find some information you are looking for. I would sign up, and prod our computing department to check this, but I'm quitting next week :-(.
- kovek 9y ago
  I wonder if there had been some efforts to index all of the mailing lists into something like elastic search? Would elastic search help when a search's phrasing doesn't quite match phrases that have been indexed? Are there other solutions?
  - captainmuon 9y ago
    We are using a search solution, which I think is provided by Microsoft (http://search.cern.ch http://search.cern.ch , I find it looks like one of these fake search engines when people on TV browse the internet ;-)). It works pretty well to index the mails, but could always be improved of course. The bigger problem is that nobody wants to sign up for the traffic heavy support mailing lists. We actually have shifters who do that and try to answer the mails. If there was something that is "pull", not "push", or if I could just watch certain tags, it would be easier to participate.
- anc84 9y ago
  Surely the confidentiality would not allow you to upload information to an US company?
  - beojan 9y ago
    Only if it were personal data, while in this case it's mostly experimental data, Monte Carlo simulations, and so on.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gepoch 9y ago
Had a team running on Askbot [1] for a few years, but nowadays we've been running on Questions for Confluence. I feel like most Atlassian shops will probably default to that route. [1] https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel
ecshafer 9y ago
My company uses haydle, which is basically the same thing and works very well.
CameronBanga 9y ago
Really not a fan of the "free for now, we'll give you an idea of pricing in the future". I understand that the team at StackOverflow probably doesn't have an idea on pricing, but it makes it extremely difficult to jump on and try the product. I guess in that situation, our team should just wait until it's out and public. But a lot of these "free betas" go on for months or even years. I know this isn't always the case, but it almost feels like at times, the goal is to get users dependent on the product before telling them how much you're going to take/charge.
- laythea 9y ago
  In my opinion, this is a tactic used when a company has less than maximum confidence in the product and want to test the water. Ie. It could be a great success and they will charge you $$$, or a complete failure and they will drop the product, or a "just ok" success, maybe due to the product itself being "ok". Even then best of these outcomes is not good (considering the risk of investing in the product early), so if they are not confident to charge 100%, I would not invest any significant time/resource into something like this. I'm out.
- cheath 9y ago
  PM on Channels here. I see what you're saying. The honest answer is that we just really need to focus on making sure the product works well before anything else. I really can't speak with confidence about pricing, because we still need to do discovery on what will work best. But what I do know is that it'll likely continue to be free for many people with some premium features that people can pay for if they want. And if not, the data you create is yours and you can export it and bail!
  - skmurphy 9y ago
    the price is a key part of product functionality.
  - sofaofthedamned 9y ago
    Thank you. But when you say 'export it and bail', what do you mean? Is it exportable in a way I can fire it into something else? Is there a definition of 'exportable'?
dustinmoris 9y ago
This could be really useful, however I wonder how teams will find answers to their questions without a private Google channel :) I don't know anyone who actually finds the answer via SO search.
- throwaway9980 9y ago
  I thought the same thing. "Oh cool!" Immediately followed by "But wait, how do I google these answers?"
- chrisan 9y ago
  > I don't know anyone who actually finds the answer via SO search. I had to load up the site just to look where the search box even was. Not that it is hidden by any means, just that my eyes follow google -> topic title -> green arrow -> scan other solutions/comments and I had no mental reference of their search bar in my head
- lowkeyokay 9y ago
  SO search never seem to find the answer I'm looking for, but once I start writing a question it almost always ends up finding a similar (answered) question. So their search works but perhaps it needs lots of input
- cheath 9y ago
  PM on Stack Overflow Channels here. You make a valid point. :) And I can assure you, the success of Channels is predicated on a solid update to the way we do search (as well as better integration with tools you might already be using, like Slack).
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  That, and one gets usually chastised when not finding a duplicate via this search box. I always check Google results, then look at the yellow suggestions box for earlier posts and sometimes end up with a duplicate (rarely but still). This usually ends up with a "closed as duplicate" (which is fine) but also sometimes end up with cynical, passive aggressive remarks on Meta. I love SO (and SE in general). It helped me to understand and discover things I was not aware of. But Meta is an abomination, full of people with ego issues and heavy complexes. I abhor this community, which is a shame as I stopped to file bugs in SO just because of the toxic environnement there.
kensai 9y ago
Sounds like... "Slack Overflow" :D (which is actually a good thing, I wish there was a hosting service with their combined strengths)
Savageman 9y ago
Does it include the "Documentation (beta)" feature?
riquito 9y ago
I'm not convinced by the free beta. I cannot ask my team members to start using it and add knowledge into this system with the risk that we'll have to migrate everything back once the costs are announced (and we'd loose time (= money) in the process).
laythea 9y ago
Stack overflow may offer lots of fancy features, but, in my opinion, the essence of what they do should be easily achievable by any competent group of engineers. Genuine question - I don't get it, what does this bring to the table? A voting system?
- jfriend 9y ago
  Microsoft built several of these Q&A systems that are "easily achievable by any competent group of engineers". They never really took off until they got Stack Overflow Enterprise. So, I guess it isn't really that easy. Note: I'm a former Microsoft PM and currently a Stack Overflow PM. My POV comes with bias.

113 points by davnicwil 9y ago

I had a side project which was basically this (at least this was my [company] for [x] summary of the project) a couple of years ago. I always wondered why StackOverflow weren't doing it, and after years of wondering this I just built it myself. I tried to publicise it a bit (not a lot, in fairness) and didn't generate much buzz. I even speculatively applied to YC with it, with the beta written and running, and got no call for an interview even. After that I lost enthusiasm for the idea, and moved on to other things. Seeing this has reminded me of it. What do people think of this? Useful product? Would you pay for it?

metalliqaz 9y ago
I think it's very cool, especially for large teams at big companies, but I'm not sure I can see my company using it. They seem to prefer home-grown solutions for lessons learned and other knowledge bases, because there is inevitably some special feature that someone considers necessary. Then, of course, you end up with huge exported spreadsheets in every single workflow. sigh
siegecraft 9y ago
It's a useful product. I'm actually surprised that the state of Stack Overflow clones isn't better. Although much of the value of SO comes from its knowledge base, the UI and organization and administration is nice to have pre-built. When I was looking around the top choices among open source/free were askbot (https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel) and osqa (https://github.com/dzone/osqa https://github.com/dzone/osqa). There was also a plug-in for Confluence (Questions) and Answerhub (seemed to be the pro/paid version of OSQA). But none of them were as nice as stack overflow, which was surprising to me.
AznHisoka 9y ago
It's a vitamin, not a painkiller. Thus it will most likely succeed if a huge brand launches it like StackOverFlow.
zerkten 9y ago
Q&A tools (or features for existing community/collaboration tools) are an common request in the enterprise space. Virtually every large organization has some kind of knowledge manager either trying to build, or manage tools for this sort of thing. It's hard to understand why you didn't get a response without more context.

azhenley 9y ago

This has already existed in the form of Stack Overflow Enterprise [1]. One major difference is that the company I was at managed and maintained their instance of Stack Overflow (it involved a lot of work). I wonder what else is different (or maybe this is just a replacement for Enterprise?) [1] https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise

cheath 9y ago
It's very similar to Enterprise. The big difference is that for Enterprise you need to have a big enough user base to sustain a community. Channels is geared towards smaller orgs, with more hooks to get Qs answered and built into the core stackoverflow.com experience.
davnicwil 9y ago
When was this launched?
- azhenley 9y ago
  It has been around since at least 2010 [1], and there was a more official release in mid 2013 [2]. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/69436/169404 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/69436/169404 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197549/169404 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/197549/169404
- cheath 9y ago
  We tried it a while ago, but we re-launched it with a much more updated solution about a year and a half ago. And it now has a dedicated ongoing team.
alexlmiller 9y ago
For context, I'm the GM of the Enterprise Team at Stack Overflow and have been working on it since we launched our full Enterprise product about 18 months ago. Enterprise is intended for large teams (at least 500 tech staff) who want to have their own completely isolated and standalone Stack Overflow community that can be run on-prem or in a private cloud. Enterprise deployments have full control over the system and also get support from our Customer Success team to build up their community using all the lessons we've learned in 8+ years of building communities. As part of this we have all those features you'd expect like integration with SSO, audibility, massive 50 page contracts, etc Channels on the other hand is meant for smaller teams (all the way down to just 2 people) who want to store their own knowledge (privately and securely) alongside the the public knowledgebase at stackoverflow.com. Any size team will be able to just walk up, put down their credit card and instantly be sharing knowledge with each other. So the two products are very complimentary to each other, just depends on your team size and exactly what you're looking for feature wise.

sklegg 9y ago

Can this do what SharePoint and private wikis can't? My team has tried both with varying degrees of success. In my experience it's always just "easier" for people to pester those who should know the answers.

rrdharan 9y ago
Various folks have been looking at Slack as the medium for handling this sort of thing, e.g.: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/niles-is-a-slack-bot-that-learns-your-teams-questions-and-answers-them-so-you-dont-have-to/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/niles-is-a-slack-bot-that-... Slack themselves are trying to tackle this as well of course: https://slack.engineering/search-at-slack-431f8c80619e https://slack.engineering/search-at-slack-431f8c80619e
brianwawok 9y ago
Of course. You need to teach this with culture. Come over and ask me something I know is in the wikki? Let's sit down and search the wikki together. No match? Then let's type up a result together and enter it for future use. You can't fix a bad process with a magic app, but a magic app can help a process work much better.
- pishpash 9y ago
  How many people are that conscientious?
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    The people that would want a wiki program to work? It only takes a few to start a culture.
emodendroket 9y ago
I mean probably not, unless you can tag people to alert them somehow.
zerkten 9y ago
Both of those are much more "free form". You have to put effort in to get some value out. That's before you think of culture, and for it to be the norm for people to use those tools. SO has structure for Q&A which solves the technical issue, but it still doesn't solve the cultural aspect. Does pestering being "easier" reflect a deeper problem? Maybe, maybe not, but in a lot of places people get annoyed having to answer the same question over and over. Committing answers to writing also helps clarify them and avoids someone walking off with institutional knowledge. In theory, that improves things.

borispavlovic 9y ago

There's a viable privately hosted alternative with Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions)

jiaweihli 9y ago
I looked into this briefly in the past, but it didn't seem viable. Reviews complain about bugginess and pricing: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-questions/cloud/reviews https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.conf... And active development stopped in early 2016: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-questions/versions https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.conf...

Hernanpm 9y ago

My team uses http://flarum.org/ http://flarum.org/ for the same purpose we even added a slack notification plugin when new questions are added.

lloydde 9y ago
What were some of your deciding factors? Does that forum software have modules or configurations that make it effective as a Q&A focused site? How does Flarum compare to say Discourse?

captainmuon 9y ago

This would be great for CERN. We do a lot of software development, but most of it is very bespoke, and you are often not going to get an answer on stackoverflow. Also there are confidentially requirements (it would be great if you could tag a post e.g. ATLAS-internal, CMS-internal, and then only people from your experiment could see that post). We probably have tens of thousands of members, so I think we have the critical size needed for such a project. Finally, I can see it not only used for programming, but also for physics, statistics, analysis questions in general. Currently, we are mostly using old school mailing lists, and it can be hard to find some information you are looking for. I would sign up, and prod our computing department to check this, but I'm quitting next week :-(.

kovek 9y ago
I wonder if there had been some efforts to index all of the mailing lists into something like elastic search? Would elastic search help when a search's phrasing doesn't quite match phrases that have been indexed? Are there other solutions?
- captainmuon 9y ago
  We are using a search solution, which I think is provided by Microsoft (http://search.cern.ch http://search.cern.ch , I find it looks like one of these fake search engines when people on TV browse the internet ;-)). It works pretty well to index the mails, but could always be improved of course. The bigger problem is that nobody wants to sign up for the traffic heavy support mailing lists. We actually have shifters who do that and try to answer the mails. If there was something that is "pull", not "push", or if I could just watch certain tags, it would be easier to participate.
anc84 9y ago
Surely the confidentiality would not allow you to upload information to an US company?
- beojan 9y ago
  Only if it were personal data, while in this case it's mostly experimental data, Monte Carlo simulations, and so on.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gepoch 9y ago

Had a team running on Askbot [1] for a few years, but nowadays we've been running on Questions for Confluence. I feel like most Atlassian shops will probably default to that route. [1] https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel

ecshafer 9y ago

My company uses haydle, which is basically the same thing and works very well.

CameronBanga 9y ago

Really not a fan of the "free for now, we'll give you an idea of pricing in the future". I understand that the team at StackOverflow probably doesn't have an idea on pricing, but it makes it extremely difficult to jump on and try the product. I guess in that situation, our team should just wait until it's out and public. But a lot of these "free betas" go on for months or even years. I know this isn't always the case, but it almost feels like at times, the goal is to get users dependent on the product before telling them how much you're going to take/charge.

laythea 9y ago
In my opinion, this is a tactic used when a company has less than maximum confidence in the product and want to test the water. Ie. It could be a great success and they will charge you $$$, or a complete failure and they will drop the product, or a "just ok" success, maybe due to the product itself being "ok". Even then best of these outcomes is not good (considering the risk of investing in the product early), so if they are not confident to charge 100%, I would not invest any significant time/resource into something like this. I'm out.
cheath 9y ago
PM on Channels here. I see what you're saying. The honest answer is that we just really need to focus on making sure the product works well before anything else. I really can't speak with confidence about pricing, because we still need to do discovery on what will work best. But what I do know is that it'll likely continue to be free for many people with some premium features that people can pay for if they want. And if not, the data you create is yours and you can export it and bail!
- skmurphy 9y ago
  the price is a key part of product functionality.
- sofaofthedamned 9y ago
  Thank you. But when you say 'export it and bail', what do you mean? Is it exportable in a way I can fire it into something else? Is there a definition of 'exportable'?

dustinmoris 9y ago

This could be really useful, however I wonder how teams will find answers to their questions without a private Google channel :) I don't know anyone who actually finds the answer via SO search.

throwaway9980 9y ago
I thought the same thing. "Oh cool!" Immediately followed by "But wait, how do I google these answers?"
chrisan 9y ago
> I don't know anyone who actually finds the answer via SO search. I had to load up the site just to look where the search box even was. Not that it is hidden by any means, just that my eyes follow google -> topic title -> green arrow -> scan other solutions/comments and I had no mental reference of their search bar in my head
lowkeyokay 9y ago
SO search never seem to find the answer I'm looking for, but once I start writing a question it almost always ends up finding a similar (answered) question. So their search works but perhaps it needs lots of input
cheath 9y ago
PM on Stack Overflow Channels here. You make a valid point. :) And I can assure you, the success of Channels is predicated on a solid update to the way we do search (as well as better integration with tools you might already be using, like Slack).
BrandoElFollito 9y ago
That, and one gets usually chastised when not finding a duplicate via this search box. I always check Google results, then look at the yellow suggestions box for earlier posts and sometimes end up with a duplicate (rarely but still). This usually ends up with a "closed as duplicate" (which is fine) but also sometimes end up with cynical, passive aggressive remarks on Meta. I love SO (and SE in general). It helped me to understand and discover things I was not aware of. But Meta is an abomination, full of people with ego issues and heavy complexes. I abhor this community, which is a shame as I stopped to file bugs in SO just because of the toxic environnement there.

kensai 9y ago

Sounds like... "Slack Overflow" :D (which is actually a good thing, I wish there was a hosting service with their combined strengths)

Savageman 9y ago

Does it include the "Documentation (beta)" feature?

riquito 9y ago

I'm not convinced by the free beta. I cannot ask my team members to start using it and add knowledge into this system with the risk that we'll have to migrate everything back once the costs are announced (and we'd loose time (= money) in the process).

laythea 9y ago

Stack overflow may offer lots of fancy features, but, in my opinion, the essence of what they do should be easily achievable by any competent group of engineers. Genuine question - I don't get it, what does this bring to the table? A voting system?

jfriend 9y ago
Microsoft built several of these Q&A systems that are "easily achievable by any competent group of engineers". They never really took off until they got Stack Overflow Enterprise. So, I guess it isn't really that easy. Note: I'm a former Microsoft PM and currently a Stack Overflow PM. My POV comes with bias.