Sococo vs. Stack Overflow for Teams

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

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

• Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
• Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
• Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.

Incentivized

• 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

• It would be great if it supported other major browsers. Not everyone has Chrome installed.
• The ongoing subscription cost is difficult to justify. This is the only reason we stopped using it.

Incentivized

• 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

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.

Incentivized

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

• Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
• It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.

Incentivized

• 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