Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams

Hey, we have a new thing for you today!

嗨，我们今天有个新东西要分享

Today’s new thing is called Stack Overflow for Teams. It lets you set up a private place on Stack Overflow where you can ask questions that will only be visible to members of your team, company, or organization. It is a paid service, but it’s not expensive.

今天的新东西被称为 Stack Overflow for Teams. 在Stack Overflow for Teams网站上你可以建立一个私有的地方去提问你仅仅想对你的团队成员、公司或者组织开放的问题。虽然是一个有偿服务但是并不昂贵。

I meet people who use Stack Overflow every single day, but a lot of them tell me they have never needed to post their own question. “All the questions are already answered!” they say. Mission accomplished, I guess!

我每天都会见到使用Stack Overflow的人，但是他们的很多问题告诉我，他们从来没有必要发布自己的问题。他们说：所有的问题都已经有了答案，我想我完成任务了。

Still, when I think about what questions developers have every day, only the ones that have to do with public stuff can be asked on Stack Overflow. Maybe you don’t have a question about Python or Android… maybe you want to ask something about your team’s own code base!

不过，当我开始思考开发者媒体都会遇到的问题的时候，只有那些与公共事务有关的问题才会在Stack Overflow上提到。也行你没有关于Python或者Android相关的问题。也许你想问一些关于你的团队的代码库的问题。

That’s the idea behind Stack Overflow Teams.

这就是Stack Overflow Teams 的背后的创意想法。

Quick background: every development team since the beginning of time has been trying to figure out how to get institutional knowledge out of people’s heads and into written, searchable form where everyone can find it. Like new members of the team. And old members of the team working on new parts of the code. And people who forgot what they did three years ago and now have questions about their own code.

快速交代背景：每个开发团队从开始都在尝试去弄清楚如何获取人们脑子中的里的知识，书写成每个人都能查到的文章。就像一个团队中新来的成员，老成员开始负责做新模块的代码。以及忘记了三年前他们是如何处理他们现在代码中的问题。

For a while developers thought wikis might be the solution. Anyone who has used a wiki for this purpose has probably discovered that not very much knowledge actually makes it into the wiki, and what does is not particularly useful, doesn’t get updated, and honestly it just feels like a bunch of homework to write a bunch of wiki documentation about your code when you don’t know if it will ever help anyone.

对于工作了一段时间的开发人员可能认为wiki可以解决这些问题。任何使用过wiki的人都可能发现并没有太多的知识被写入wiki，儿那些不是特别有用的知识也不会被更新进wiki，老实说，看起来写一堆wiki文档就像是在写家庭作业并不知道是否对他们有用。

Another solution being sold today is the idea of having some kind of online IRC-style chat rooms, and hoping that by searching those chat archives, you can find “institutional knowledge.” Ha ha ha! Even if that works, all you really find is the history of some conversation people had. It might have clues but it’s not knowledge.

另一个解决方案的卖点就是它是建立在一种IRC-style聊天室的在线风格的基础上的，希望通过搜索这些聊天的记录，你能发现想要的知识点。哈哈，即使这行得通，你真正能找到的只是人们交谈的历史。那可能有线索，但是并不是知识；

But you know what does work? A Q&A system. Like Stack Overflow.

但是你知道问答系统起什么作用吗，就像 Stack Overflow.

Why? Because unlike wikis, you don’t write documentation in the hopes that one day it might help someone. You answer questions that are going to help someone immediately. And you can stop answering the minute you get the green checkmark that shows that you solved their problem.

为什么用他呢，因为不像wiki文档，你写文档的期望不是为了有一天能帮助到某个人，你回答问题将会立刻帮助某人。并且当这个问题已经被其他人解决的时候你就能看到一个绿色的选择标记，这时候你可以停止回答。

And unlike chatrooms, searching actually works. It finds you a question and its answers, not a conversation-captured-in-amber.

This is why Stack Overflow worked so much better on the public internet than the previous generation of discussion forums, and we think that it will work for all the same reasons with teams’ proprietary questions and answers.

When you join a team, you’ll see your team’s private questions right on stackoverflow.com (although they actually live in a separate database for security). Your teams are listed in the left hand navbar.

不想聊天是，搜索实际有效，它会找到你的一个问题和对应的答案。不是一个conversation-captured-in-ambe（不知道啥意思）

这就是为什么Stack Overflow在公共互联网上比之前传统讨论论坛效果要好很多的原因。我们认为对于团队专有问题和答案的这种情况，Stack Overflow同样发挥作用。

当你加入一个团队的时候，你将会在Stack Overflow上面看到你们团队私有的问题。（尽管他们实际上为了安全存在于不同的数据库），你的团队将会在左侧导航栏中列出来。

 

Everything else works pretty much … like you would expect. When you ask a question, you can direct it to your team or to the whole world. The UI makes it very clear whether you are posting publicly or privately. If you are asking a question of your team, there’s a Notify field so you can type the names of some people who might be able to answer the question, and they’ll hear about it right away.

 

When you search, you can search everywhere, or just within your team. You can set up tags that are specific to your team, too.

The pricing is designed to be “no-brainer” pricing, starting at just $10 per month for the first ten users.

I think Stack Overflow for Teams is going to be almost as important to developers’ daily work as public Stack Overflow. It brings Stack Overflow’s uniquely powerful system to every developer question, not just the things that can be discussed in public. You can stop asking your teammates questions in email (where they help nobody else) or in chatrooms (where they are impossible to find) and start building your own private knowledge base to document your code and answer future teammates’ questions before they have them.