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by benpopper1 1922 days ago
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...

2 comments

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.

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.

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?