Stack Overflow launched its own private spaces for coding teams where you can ask questions privately. Stack Overflow Teams is nothing but an isolated private spaces that you create with your team members. It has a generous free tier and you can add up to 50 members for free in your Team. Additionally, it offers free Microsoft Teams and Slack integration so you can search for questions and answers from your Stack Overflow Teams directly. You can do everything that you do in Stack Overflow public space. Ask questions, write answers, moderate questions & answers, and it has the same badges & scoring system as well. In short, it is a mini Stack Overflow that will be only visible to the people you invite in your team.
If you have used Stack Overflow to ask programming questions then you can now do that in a private space. With the new Teams feature, Stack Overflow offers private knowledge bases for your entire team Anyone can create a team and invite other users to it. The teams are invite only so to join a team, you will need an invitation link from the admin of the team. Ad admin can manage users, promote them or even remove them from a simple easy to use panel. There are other things as well such enabling night mode, custom tags management, change name and URL of teams that you can do once you create a team.
Stack Overflow for Teams: Create Private Knowledge Base for Teams with all Stack Overflow Features
In order to create a team, you only need to have a Stack Overflow account. Next, you go to the Teams section here and create one by giving it a name and URL.
After it creates your team, you will be redirected to the main dashboard. There you will see a welcome message and some generic questions added by community. You can see how the final look and feel of the teams spaces will be. The main interface of the Stack Overflow teams looks like this.
You can customize the look and feel of the private space you just created. You can add your custom logo, or exchange the name and URL of the tam anytime whenever you want.
The next step you have to do is add users in your team. For that, you go to Admin settings > Users and permissions section. From here you can invite new members to your team via their email. Or, if you can manage existing members. You can assign moderator like roles to some users or even remove them from the team easily.
Stack Overflow team support Microsoft Teams and Slack integration. With this, you can now search your private knowledge base directly from a chat in Teams. You can add the Stack Overflow teams bot to Slack or Microsoft Teams and then run simple commands to fetch data. All you will have to so is login with your Stack Overflow account there in order to make the integration success.
Same thing can be done Slack. Invite members and people you want to collaborate with and it is ideal for startups as well who want to keep their knowledge private. You can verify a domain in the settings so that people with a same domain email address will be able to join automatically. Or, you can just stick to the manual invitations if you want to. There are other things that you can configure in the settings such as watching specific tags or ignored tags.
Final words…
Stack Overflow for Teams is a very nice private knowledge base for small teams of developers and programmers. It is a private version of Stack Overflow where you control everything and a user can ask a question to any member in the team directly. Another nice that I liked is the Facebook like “reactions” that other users leave on posts. However, the free tier done’t have some other useful features such as custom reputation badges and Single Sign-On(SSO). To have extra features, you will have to upgrade to the premium plans of Teams on Stack Overflow.
