World’s one of the most popular computer programming Q&A portals, Stack Overflow, has announced a new feature called Channels. Stack Overflow Channels will be a dedicated private space for teams to share their questions and get answers internally.
“We launched Stack Overflow Enterprise last year to help large organizations share knowledge internally. But as we expanded Enterprise to more and more large companies, it became clear that smaller teams also have the need to share knowledge in a private space. We realized that our platform gives us the unique opportunity to create a product specifically designed for teams who can’t sustain an entire community of their own. So, a few weeks ago we began work on Channels, which will allow developers to ask and answer questions with their colleagues in a private area on Stack Overflow.”
Source: Stack Overflow
The company explains that developers can use
Channels just like the public Stack Overflow, however, the questions will be shared within the organization so that the internal engineering team members can answer those questions in a private secure space.
The major advantages of this new feature to the devs include –
- A secure private space to share your query with internal team.
- If you have requisite knowledge about a question, you can share your expert answer as long as you are part of the team.
- Apart from these, the base features of Stack Overflow, like searching a technical problem will still be usable to the users.
The company informs that Stack Overflow Channels will be completely free while in beta. But, they are exploring opportunities to bring this service in paid model also by adding more value to the feature.
If this new Channels feature interests you, you can be part of it via
Sign up page. If you need more information before trying it, you can read
this meta post shared by the Stack Overflow team.