Today, we're excited to announce the first-ever new content type to Stack Overflow for Teams, our knowledge and collaboration SaaS product. We know that developers and technologists are often searching across multiple tools or pinging colleagues on chat to find the information they need - and even then, they’re often left with outdated or incomplete knowledge.
Articles is a game-changing functionality in Stack Overflow for Teams. It brings all formats of knowledge into one place for easy building, searching and sharing. This means that team members are now able to proactively and reactively create and share knowledge.
This is a major release for us - we’re no longer relying solely on questions and answers to share knowledge. We know that the most productive teams need to share information proactively to help speed up onboarding and learning new technologies as well as provide a transparent way for members to ask questions and give answers. We believe the addition of Articles rounds out the knowledge-sharing landscape for Teams.
So how can Articles within Stack Overflow for Teams be used? There are many possibilities, as Articles allows longer-form content like documentation, policies and procedures, how-to guides, and much more. You can also link multiple questions into an Article, much like a Collection. Anything that a technical team member needs to do their job can now be stored in Teams as an Article, a Collection (of Q&As or Articles), or an individual Q&A.
Now it would have been easy for us to just enable the ability to create longer-form content and call it a day. But given our strong focus on building a product that excels at creating useful content while keeping information fresh and relevant, we believed it necessary to have some of those pieces be a part of this first Articles release. To strengthen this new content type, we have, for the first time in 12 years, updated our markdown editor to a more WYSIWYG style editor for Articles only, backed by the open source CommonMark parser, and preserving the formatting from any rich text content sources. Based on feedback from our Teams users and usage data, we have updated our content voting mechanism on Articles, to allow users to provide highly contextual, actionable and private feedback to the owners and editors of the post. All in all, this release paves the way to a lot more exciting updates around content management and creation for our Teams users.
With the addition of Articles, you can search for more types of information within Stack Overflow for Teams, find it, and get back to building great things. We know it doesn’t mean the need for chat apps goes away. In fact, we continue to invest in and support our integrations with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams as we know how valuable those tools are for the developer and technologist workflow. Articles within Stack Overflow for Teams should make your experience within each of those platforms even better.
Stack Overflow revolutionized large scale knowledge sharing 12 years ago and Stack Overflow for Teams is doing the same for collaboration and internal knowledge within companies every single day. For now, Articles will only be available on Stack Overflow for Teams, Business & Enterprise. We believe that there are interesting potential use-cases worth exploring for public Stack Overflow for both Collections and Articles. We are planning to start with one feature very soon, stay tuned. We will conduct user research and solicit feedback on these use cases and communicate our plans as they progress, since it is vital that an eventual rollout isn't disruptive to the Public Q&A experience.
In the meantime, if you want to see Articles for yourself, read more and reach out to our team to set up a demo.