Specific technologies, general approaches, and best practices can all be discussed, debated, and evolved in the virtual public square. For this type of knowledge discovery, the worldwide community excels in providing mentorship, expertise, and inspiring innovation.

However, discussing your intellectual property, details about your tech stack and processes, or company-specific knowledge in the public realm can weaken your competitive advantage and expose your products to risk. Some knowledge simply doesn’t belong on a public platform.

When you’re thinking about internal knowledge and collaboration, there are certain factors you should consider. You need an intentional strategy for how your teams work together to solve problems, innovate, and store knowledge for future teams and projects. If the following sections sound like familiar pain points in your knowledge management process, your organization is likely a great candidate for Stack Internal.

Who owns your knowledge?

Organizations turn to Stack Internal private platform because they retain more granular control over their knowledge and who can manage it. Stack Internal enables organizations to democratize which knowledge is archived, updated, and accepted as part of the shared knowledge base. On the public site, if a certain number of users upvote or downvote, that accepted answer may not be the best answer for your environment.

Compared to the public platform, Stack Overflow for Teams (“Teams”) gives you more control over users' roles and privileges. You can assign roles and permissions, like moderator, reviewer, or admin. You can also restrict information to a subset of users with sub-teams. Subteams are useful for specialized or project-based content. One challenge we see with both traditional knowledge and public repositories is the sheer volume of irrelevant information that does not match an organization’s current initiatives. Teams offers organizations the tools to identify, update, and archive knowledge that has become dated.

Stack Internal Content Health feature helps to intelligently identify and surface potentially outdated or inaccurate knowledge. Using this feature, your teams can curate an accurate knowledge base as your business environment evolves. If your central knowledge base becomes outdated, your employees’ and coworkers’ trust that they can find the right answers erodes.

With Content Health, you not only own the knowledge, but you can better ensure it stays up to date as your organization and technology evolve. Actions available to keep your knowledge healthy include validation the knowledge is still correct, updating it to match the current best solution, or archiving it so that your team does not waste cycles wading through old or wrong information.