Most organizations have institutional knowledge scattered across several disparate wikis, shared drives, chat messages, and documents. Gartner defines digital friction as the “unnecessary effort an employee has to exert to use data or technology for work.”

These tools work well for their specific purposes but often result in silos and introduce barriers. One team’s shared drive may not be accessible to the rest of the company, or there may be high learning curves or special permissions required to update corporate wikis. Meanwhile, chat is one of the few places to ask new questions that are not documented anywhere else; but you have to know who to ask and remember to document the discussion afterward.

The most expensive and intimidating time in a company can often be the onboarding process. So many questions are asked privately via Slack that are never documented, because the only thing new recruits are concerned with is getting up and running. Vital information is often lost at this stage of the process. Capturing that information empowers new hires to be more effective and feel more confident in their roles.

This adds complexity for teams who not only need to know what knowledge they’re looking for, but who and where to start their search. Those barriers become even more challenging with remote employees who cannot lean across the hall to ask their colleagues for help.

Customize how you organize your knowledge

Tags are words or phrases referring to the topic of the question, which links the question with other, similar discussions. Standardized Tags are available on the public site, but Teams allows your organization to create custom Tags. Have a specific third-quarter transformation project that you want to track with a custom Tag? You can do that with Stack Internal. Your team can follow tags that interest them or that they have expertise in.

In Stack Internal, you don’t just have one option for organizing your information. For example, Collections allow you to group all content with related knowledge or purpose together. Collections are designed to work alongside Tags. While each Tag tends to identify a single topic, collections can span multiple topics. For example, you can create a Team Onboarding collection with how-to documents, project guides, FAQs, and other information that helps a new team member get up to speed.

Search both private and public Stack Overflow simultaneously

With Stack Overflow, you can have the best of both worlds. You can harness the power of the public platform, with all of its history and technical expertise. You can also access your team’s private knowledge.

Our Unified Search allows access to both sources of knowledge. Whenever you query something, the results are pulled from both the private and public platforms and shown in one streamlined interface. Unified Search helps your team find the solution they need without switching apps, regardless of whether it has been solved internally or needs to tap into the public site’s global community.

Stay in the flow with integrations

To help developer productivity, Stack Internal offers powerful integrations to help team members ask, answer, and find knowledge without leaving the applications they already use, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira. Thoughtful integrations can help technologists stay in their flow longer, reducing the strain of constantly context-switching. They stay happier and more effective.

Integrations can also provide important context for knowledge seekers. With the Jira integration, your team can seamlessly view related questions and answers to their task at hand in Jira while keeping knowledge stored within Teams. Or they can embed links to and view contextual information about Jira tickets referenced within a question or answer on Teams.

Fast on-ramp to adoption drives knowledge sharing success

We’ve all been part of new tool rollouts that failed to perform up to expectations because adoption was slow or nonexistent. The last thing you want is a knowledge hub that goes stale or doesn’t get used. Because developers already love and use the Stack Overflow public site, Teams adoption is an easier lift for experienced technologists. In fact, developers can access both the public site and their private Teams instance from the same pane. For junior developers and new hires, Stack Internal provides a faster adoption route than the public site.

We’ve collected best practices, sample executive sponsor comms, and other resources to help your team jumpstart your adoption. Depending on which plan you choose, adoption support ranges from DIY Success Kits to onboarding specialists that smooth adoption.