This post refers to “Channels”, a product which is now called “Teams.”

Here’s What We’re Working on and How You Can Get Involved

On Stack Overflow, a question gets asked once, answered, and then becomes a central point of knowledge for thousands of others who read it on our site. But what about developers who don’t have the luxury of being public about their work?

Today, we’re announcing Stack Overflow Channels for teams that need a dedicated, private space to share knowledge. We’re working hard on an early beta, and we want your active involvement in the product as we build it. If you’re interested in early access and product updates, sign up here!

Why Channels?

We launched Stack Overflow Enterprise last year to help large organizations share knowledge internally. Like public Stack Overflow, it uses the power of a large community: devs ask questions and other devs from across the organization answer them.

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.

What are Channels?

Stack Overflow Channels will:

• Create a secure space for your engineering team to ask and answer questions about anything that needs to stay private.
• Reduce single-source-of-information bottlenecks by sharing any dev’s technical knowledge with every dev on your team.
• Make it easy to find solutions to technical problems on a searchable platform where knowledge is always discoverable.
• Put institutional knowledge in a familiar place that you and your team are already visiting.

Stack Overflow Channels will be completely free while in beta. Although it will likely remain free for some users, we hope to use the beta to see how we can add enough value that many teams want to pay for it.

If you’re interested in being one of the first people to get access or just want updates about our progress, head over to this page to get involved. We’ll start inviting teams to join our beta soon.

And of course, for more in-depth discussion, check out this meta post.