Tags | Private teams |
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This documentation is for Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise. Free, Basic, and Business users can access their documentation here. Find your plan.
Overview
Private Teams in Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise (SOE) give you and your team members an area to work collaboratively and privately. If users have questions that aren't relevant outside of their company team or department, or those questions have sensitive information that shouldn't be visible to all users, a Private Team may be the right solution.
NOTE: Once you enable Private Teams for your SOE site, you can't disable this feature. Once you create a Private Team, you can't delete it.
If you're a member of a Private Team, you'll see it listed underneath the left-hand navigation menu. To enter a Private Team, click on its name.
When to use a Private Team
Private Teams can reflect the internal structure of your organization. Where information is sensitive or private, a Private Team can protect that content.
Possible use cases for Private Teams
Department | Private Topic(s) |
Support | Issue Management |
HR | Recruiting, Salary |
Product | R&D, Strategy |
Legal | Contracts, Negotiations |
Before you enable or create Private Teams
While Private Teams can be a great solution for supporting smaller collaborative teams, they're not without their drawbacks. It's important to remember that questions, answers, and articles posted to a Private Team are only visible to members of that team. Users should be diligent to post a Private Team only when the question warrants it. General questions still belong on the main where all users can see them.
Helping your users post in the correct area (Private Team or main site) will help avoid general information being locked away from your main user base. Also, try to avoid creating multiple Private Teams that have the same set of members. Having Private Teams with similar membership can cause confusion and will further fracture your knowledgebase.
Other considerations
Teams can create "silos" of knowledge, with content accessible only to a limited subset of your users. This negates some of the benefits of Stack Overflow, including centralized knowledge and collaboration, elimination of redundancy, and improved efficiency.
Building community and engagement is more challenging with Private Teams, as they divide your user base.
There's no moderator role for Private Teams.
There are no Content Health features in Private Teams.
Reputation earned by users for content in a Private Team isn’t reflected in their profile on the main site.
You can't easily migrate content from a Private Team to the main site. Migration is a manual copy-paste operation, and you'll lose all attribution for questions, answers, and comments.
You can access Private Teams only with API v3 (not API v2).
You can't view usage stats or trends across all Private Teams. You have to access each Private Team's dashboard and reports individually.
The Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations do not fully support Private Teams.
In the Microsoft Teams integration, you'll have no link unfurling, notifications, personal tab, or searching.
In the Slack integration, you'll have no unfurls, search, or ask.
Private Teams roles and responsibilities
Three distinct roles come into play in each Private Team. A site admin creates and sets up the team, a team owner sets the direction of the team and invites members, and team members bring the Private Team to life by adding questions, answers, and other content.
Site admin
Site admins perform the following duties for Private Teams.
From the main SOE site
Enable Private Teams (reach out to support to get the process started).
Clicking Admin settings then Teams allows a site admin to:
Create teams.
To create a Private Team, fill in the Team name and Team URL fields. The site admin will also need to add at least one team owner in the Team Owners field.
NOTE: In order for a site admin to change the settings of a Private Team, they must be a team owner. For convenience, they can add themselves to the Team Owners field when they create the Private Team.
Manage all teams.
Site admins can click into a team to add or remove members, promote and demote team owners, control API sync, and download a Private Team roster in CSV format.
From within a Private Team
To change the settings of a Private Team, a site admin (and team owner) should click into the Private Team from the list at the bottom of the left-hand menu. They'll then click Admin settings. From there, a site admin will see the same menus and settings as a private team owner (see below).
Private Team owner
A site admin can designate one or more users to be Private Team owners, giving them administrative control over all aspects of the Private Team. Site admins may also want to add themselves as team owner.
From within a Private Team
To change the settings of a Private Team, the team owner should click into the Private Team from the list at the bottom of the left-hand menu. They'll then click Admin settings. From there, a team owner can access the following settings for that Private Team:
Appearance Change theme, colors, team name, and URL.
Tags Manage tags used in the Private Team.
Custom awards Manage up to 10 custom awards used in the Private Team.
Dashboard Manage the benchmarks displayed in the Private Team's dashboard.
Users and permissions Manage the Private Team's members to add and remove members, change roles, configure LDAP, and more.
User groups Manage user groups used in the Private Team.
Content
Team owners also have unrestricted access to add or manage content. This includes editing or deleting all questions, answers, Articles, and Collections within the Private Team. They do not need to be the author of the content to edit or delete it.
Having full content access allows the team owner to steer the content of a Private Team by editing the starter questions (see below) or adding their own questions and Articles. This helps ensure that a new Private Team gets off to a good start.
Other features
Onboarding banners, checklists, and starter questions
When a site admin creates a new Private Team, SOE will include some guidance to assist in onboarding new team members. This includes prompts and information on how the Private Teams feature works, as well as starter questions that site admins and team owners can edit to provide additional guidance.
Team emails
Email notifications are part of the Private Teams feature. Site admins (not team owners) can turn off specific emails from a Private Team if desired.
The Private Team emails include:
Welcome email for team owners
Welcome email for team members
Notification for member removed from the team
Notification for member mentioned in content
Notification of answered question
Notification of accepted answer
Administrators can learn more about Private Teams email configuration in the Engagement Emails and Management article.
Removed Private Team members
When a user is removed from a Private Team:
Content becomes anonymous but remains visible in the Private Team. Site admins and team owners can restore a deleted user from the Private Team Admin settings page.
SOE ensures that at least one team owner remains for the Private Team. SOE will not allow a site admin or team owner to delete or change the role of the last team owner.