Announcing our new integration with Microsoft Teams
Collaboration and information discovery should be easy, no matter what software platform you’re using at the moment. Today we’re excited to announce a new integration that will allow you to access the power of Stack Overflow for Teams inside of Microsoft Teams!
Internally we’ve taken to calling it Teams Teams, or just Teams². Whatever you choose to call it, this integration allows the users to take the ideas they exchange every day in chat and transform those exchanges into a rich knowledge base that empowers everyone at their organization to be more productive.
We strive to make knowledge sharing a seamless part of our user’s existing workflow, and we know the impact of context switching can have on your productivity. Stack Overflow for Teams’ integration with Microsoft Teams connects your chat and your internal knowledge base. You can now stay up-to-date with notifications of new information, search for existing answers, even start your question right from the chat platform. We’re excited to announce that the integration is available today on our Basic and Business tiers and will to be available for Enterprise in Q1 of 2020.
“Microsoft has a deep history and incredible reputation as a company that builds software which helps people get things done. Today, tens of millions of workers rely on Microsoft Teams to collaborate in real time. We’re thrilled to be integrating Stack Overflow for Teams with Microsoft Teams. This will allow users to easily search, update, and share information exchanged in chat. The end result is less context switching and fewer repeated questions, meaning teams can be more productive and the best information will rise to the top,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow.
Microsoft
Microsoft is one of the world’s largest and most well respected technology companies. But even after four decades in business, the firm continues to evolve. There are more than 50,000 developers working at Microsoft, and until recently, conversations and questions about products and services happened over email or group chat.
The conversations Microsoft employees are having in Teams can now be turned into a form of on-demand documentation, where questions and answers that happen in real time are preserved for use across the company. This breaks down the silos found in email or chat and allows the wisdom of the crowd to surface the best ideas and identify the subject matter experts.
Our out-of-the-box integration
Tens of millions of workers rely on Microsoft teams to collaborate and get their work done faster. We knew that our integration could help keep people stay in the application they already use and love, helping to improve productivity by accessing internal knowledge even faster.
Mike Ammerlaan, Director, Microsoft 365 Ecosystem at Microsoft Corp. added, “As remote work becomes more common and companies strive to have a global presence, teamwork and seamless collaboration becomes even more critical in supporting a company’s success. By accessing Stack Overflow for Teams and a repository of knowledge without leaving Microsoft Teams, employees will spend less time searching for information and more time building great products.”
Below are a few things you can expect from our new integration with Microsoft Teams:
Reduce context switching
Customers who use Microsoft Teams for collaboration as part of Office 365 can now access internal information quickly without leaving Teams. Team members can interact with a bot to get answers from Stack Overflow for Teams to any of their questions.
Access centralized knowledge
Help your organization break previous knowledge sharing habits including a disparate knowledge base. The questions and answers that used to quickly get lost in chat can now easily be integrated into a searchable database with lasting value.
Always stay up-to-date
With our Microsoft Teams integration, you can keep a pulse on the latest answers and information. You can automate notifications based on tags, you will never miss the latest on topics you care the most about.
If you’re already a Stack Overflow for Teams and Microsoft Teams user, click here to connect your knowledge base with Microsoft Teams.
New to Stack Overflow for Teams? Now it’s free for your first 25 users. Try Teams for free today and make internal knowledge sharing and information discovery even easier with our new integration.
Tags: integrations, launch announcement, new features, stack overflow for teams
14 Comments
Can you provide any screenshots of the actual integration? The promo video showed several shots of Microsoft employees using Stack Overflow or Stack Overflow Teams, but didn’t show any use of Microsoft Teams (or how it integrates SO Teams).
Will a similar integration with Skype for Business be coming? My present organization uses Skype, but not Teams.
Skype for Business hits End of Life on July 31st, 2021 (roughly 1.5 years away), so probably no. Microsoft’s official recommendation for a while has been to move from Skype For Business to Teams (which does everything Skype does and more). If your org hasn’t made plans yet to migrate (or at least deploy Teams, which is available to everyone and compatible with Skype), you may want to recommend that to the group at your org that handles that.
Also, now that I think about it, this request doesn’t make sense at all since there are no connectors for Skype like there are for MS Teams (Skype is an app, Teams is an app/platform rolled into one). So I’m not even sure how a Stack Overflow for Teams connector for Skype would even work.
Err… ummm… skype for business is a discontinued product. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Skype-for-Business-Online-to-Be-Retired-in-2021/ba-p/777833
Great, would have been nice if you add some screenshots or integration steps.
“Tens of millions of workers rely Microsoft teams”
Typo? Should be “rely on”
Good stuff all around.
progect java
Disregarding the typo, I still highly doubt that.
That’s great!
Recently more and more teams I have been working with prefer slack for communication. It might be interesting to take a look if the integration with slack is the next potential point of growth.
We’ve already got one: https://stackoverflow.com/teams/integrations/slack
no screenshots??
This is a Promo move from (or for?) Microsoft, I guess.
As a long year Stackoverflow user I feel mildly affronted by this.
Microsoft and Windows per se is the exact opposite of “helping each other”, “community driven” and everything else stackoverflow stands (or stood?) for.
This might be the beginning of stackoverflows end as a diverse, flourishing community. And the beginning of a wonderful corporate future with Microsoft, but without the people who made stackoverflow what it is today.
Time will tell. Do be like github.
Microsoft owns GitHub.
Also it seems like your beef is with open-source vs closed-source applications. It may surprise you to learn that Microsoft has been open-sourcing a lot of stuff. They open-sourced Visual Studio, PowerShell, .NET, their famous calc.exe program, have a Windows Subsystem for Linux, and more.
You should check out https://opensource.microsoft.com/ for more info on that.