Knowledge silos can sometimes feel inevitable, but when you leave them unchecked, they can quickly lead to frustrated employees and stalled innovation. The answer is typically more frequent and efficient collaboration, but how do you take that from what feels like a lofty goal to reality? When you invest in products that make collaboration both intuitive and meaningful, collaboration not only increases, but becomes a recurring habit that creates self-sustaining communities and accelerates learning and adoption for your latest initiatives.
In this release, we’re adding several new features and updates that make collaboration intuitive and meaningful at different touch points in the Stack Overflow for Teams user journey, from the initial homepage experience to API workflows to our Slack app and more.
Let’s take a look at our second Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise release of the year in more detail, focusing on how it’s making collaboration more intuitive and meaningful for your teams.
An intuitive, personalized, and actionable initial Stack Overflow for Teams experience makes it easier for your users to adopt its collaboration and knowledge-sharing features into their workflows. In this release, we’ve reimagined the homepage so users can more confidently navigate your Stack Overflow for Teams site to discover opportunities to share knowledge, collaborate with peers, and learn something new with every login.
Not everyone is familiar with Stack Overflow’s format. The personalized homepage surfaces important “For You” tasks, questions and answers, articles, and Communities activity in a single place so navigating your site is easy and intuitive.
Unanswered questions can erode trust in your knowledge base. Your subject matter experts and users will see unanswered questions relevant to them as soon as they log in so they feel empowered to answer or recommend qualified peers.
Generic content can be unhelpful and distracting. The homepage surfaces trending content and activity based on tag preferences and Communities membership so your users focus on what matters most to their work (learn how to control your tag preferences).
Steady knowledge-sharing retains your website thriving and up-to-date. On the homepage your customers will see their badge progress and the way many individuals have upvoted, bookmarked, or adopted their content material so that they’re motivated to maintain contributing.
Stack Overflow’s question-and-answer format lets you doc your group’s data in a extra pure approach and crowdsource options from area specialists. However generally you must create complementary long-form documentation that covers broad matters, like how-to steering and insurance policies. Articles serve this use case, and within the Enterprise 2023.3 release we made it simpler to handle their lifecycle. On this launch we’ve added the flexibility to collaboratively draft articles within the platform so that you spend much less time switching context and copying/pasting content material.
With article drafts you possibly can collaborate with different customers to take an article from a non-public tough draft to a elegant piece of content material that’s able to be printed, voted on, and found alongside questions and solutions. Article authors can add collaborators through “Permission settings” which is able to ship them a “For You” notification so that they know to start out contributing. Drafts are seen to the unique writer, collaborators, website directors, and moderators within the Articles feed.
Stack Overflow for Groups clients proceed to amaze us with the artistic options they construct with our API. On this launch, we’ve added new Communities and Collections API v3 endpoints so you possibly can lengthen much more platform performance into your customized reporting, purposes, and workflows.
Communities in Stack Overflow for Groups are self-organizing teams the place customers make the most of a strategic mixture of tags to collaboratively study, share, and resolve issues round particular matters or domains. With the brand new Communities API v3 endpoint, you possibly can fetch knowledge for specific communities, automate onboarding, and extra:
- Enrich your present reporting initiatives by fetching a listing of Communities and their properties (e.g. tags, member depend). You too can fetch Group knowledge for the /questions, /solutions, and /customers endpoints.
- Automate Group membership when customers be part of the corporate, change groups, or kick off a brand new venture so that they study and get up-to-speed quicker.
- Lengthen Communities performance to customized integrations that authenticate on a per consumer foundation. For instance, you possibly can immediate customers to hitch a Group from Slack or Microsoft Groups.
Collections are a solution to manually group questions, solutions, and articles that relate to a particular theme, use case, or occasion, like onboarding or Gross sales Kickoff. With the brand new Collections API v3 endpoint, you possibly can fetch knowledge for specific Collections and extra:
- Enhance your present reporting initiatives by fetching a listing of Collections and their properties (e.g. tags, content material depend). You too can fetch Assortment knowledge for the /questions, /solutions, and /articles endpoints
- Save time and handle Collections at scale by bulk including questions and articles to a brand new Assortment.
We all know that lots of our clients use Slack for the majority of their synchronous communication and have come to anticipate a constant expertise throughout the apps they use there. On this launch, we’ve made some vital updates to our search expertise in Slack that enhance usability, scale back context switching, and velocity up time-to-answer.
Notice: To reap the benefits of these updates, you’ll need to reinstall the Slack app.
Now you can invoke the Stack Overflow for Groups app to extra intuitively search your data base for a specific subject utilizing the “@Stack Overflow for Groups” command along with the “/stack” command.
If you use the “@Stack Overflow for Groups” command to go looking your Stack Overflow for Groups data base, responses will probably be in thread as a substitute of the channel to keep away from pointless noise and muddle.
Slack search responses now present the reply with probably the most upvotes so you possibly can entry community-sourced solutions.
Slack search responses now have call-to-action buttons that show primarily based on the context to drive steady engagement with the Stack Overflow for Groups app. For instance, customers will probably be inspired to reply unanswered questions or suggest certified friends.
Since voting is central to our mannequin of fostering neighborhood engagement and high quality content material contributions, we proceed to discover methods to make upvoting and interacting with content material extra intuitive and seamless. Within the Enterprise 2023.3 release, we added the flexibility to upvote content material straight from Slack and Microsoft Groups notifications. You now have much more methods to work together with content material with the flexibility to upvote and bookmark posts you discover useful straight from the Questions feed. The button state will mirror the put up’s upvote/bookmark standing.
For extra particulars on the enhancements above and different updates with the most recent launch, view the 2024.2 release notes.