'Stack Overflow Teams' Lets Companies Create Developer Wikis
Developer teams are all different, and typically have their own methods of doing things. Fortunately, a new feature from Stack Overflow helps circulate unique information among developers within teams. It’s a tool called – wait for it – Teams. For $10 per month, Stack Overflow will give you a private repository to host your own questions and answers. It works just like the Stack Overflow you’ve grown to know and tolerate, too; the team archive is searchable, and it’s all hosted on a secure network (i.e., “logically separated into its own SQL schema”). Your monthly spend also allows you unlimited posts to your team. Teams using Slack for work can even weave the Teams functionality directly into it. Teams also uses tags, and rewards users with badges and points for successfully answered questions. The aim is “any group working on a project together,” says Stack Overflow. Which may leave you wondering what happens to your team data if the project ends. Stack Overflow says teams have full access to data for the life of their subscription, and will convert to a read-only mode for 60 days once your monthly payments stop. If you want to export the data (to JSON), it can be done anytime within your subscription period or the read-only window. After that point, all data is deleted. Stack Overflow Teams is nice because it allows your team to have its own wiki of sorts. As you work on projects, even something as simple as code styling or where files are stored can be Q&As on Stack Overflow Teams. This can be especially handy for on-boarding new team members; rather than waste time searching or bothering others, a well-defined Teams portal will help them out with a minimum of fuss. If there’s a downside, it’s the ceiling on how large groups can become before Stack Overflow Teams is unreasonably priced. The $10 monthly spend is good for up to 10 members, with each additional member costing $5 (if billed annually; if you want to go month-to-month on additional members, it’s $6/month). When the difference between 10 and 12 members is double the cost, there’s an issue.