Socialtext (discontinued) vs. Stack Overflow for Teams

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

In my opinion, Stack Overflow for Teams is well suited for an organization that is on a hiring spree for the engineering teams. The reason for it is because instead of catering to doubts of new joinees individually, they can be asked to refer to the Stack Overflow and hence will save a lot of time for both new joiners as well as the existing employees.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• Sharing technical solutions to problems we encounter in our internal development environment.
• Sharing best practices we find in external resources.
• Discussions on design patterns and conventions we can use in our projects.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

• I would recommend an increased engineering focus on the Microsoft Teams integration.
• It would be nice to make more medals.
• Easier ways to earn points.

Incentivized

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

It's easier to use Stack Overflow for Teams Q&A to maintain our knowledge base over time, over the Confluence wikis that we also maintain. You don't need to bother about folders, filenames, templates - just ask a question and answer it or get it answered. It feels less formal, so developers feel more free to add content.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions

• It makes the search for answers more efficient, so devs can focus in more important things.
• Knowledge is not lost, even if people leave the company.

Incentivized