Discourse for Teams (Alpha Testing summer 2020)

[tobiaseigen]

Update: Discourse for Teams is live! Visit https://teams.discourse.com to learn more and to spin up a 30-day free trial. Still welcome feedback but the alpha testing stage is over so I am closing this topic. Thanks everyone who helped us get across the finish line!

Discourse for Teams is here!

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You may have noticed that my profile here now flaunts flair - I spend half my life here on meta anyway so it’s only natural that I’ve now joined the CDCK team! I am working primarily on Discourse for Teams, a new hosted product we are building that uses the same open source Discourse software we know and love, but with some secret sauce added to make it even more amazing for team collaboration.

We’re now looking for some volunteers to trial Discourse for Teams and give us real world feedback on the experience. Specifically, we need teams of 5 or more people, some of whom have never seen Discourse before, willing to take Teams though its paces by using it to collaborate internally.

Teams ships with a large number of unique features and a careful curation of plugins we find are very effective in a team environment such as policy, end to end encryption, checklist, calendar, knowledge explorer and more.

If you’re interested in committing to a trial, send me a PM or email support<at>teams.discourse.com

In exchange, we will provide you up with a free site and extensive support. We will also add you to a private category here on meta where you can mix with other alpha testers and discuss ways to improve Teams.

[maiki]

First of all, congrats on your flair.

Second, I’m excited to hear about Discourse for Teams.

I work with Discourse a whole bunch, and non-public instances are split between work teams and “faerie rings”.

Faerie rings are groups of folks that are working together for a short amount of time, but primarily have flat hierarchies. For “normal” work teams, it’s still most me and one or two people using Discourse as our CRM/PM suite, ya know the whole category-per-project/client deal.

So… is Discourse for Teams Alpha Testing of interest to me? “5 to 12” people is like the one range I can’t accommodate.

Thanks for moving in this direction.

[EricGT]

StackOverflow did similar as many of us know.

So I will give the same similar suggestion, students in high school and undergraduates often will not ask for help in the real world or when they do want to hide their identify because they think they will look like ???

It seems that StackOverflow for such is very popular.

Personally I think this is a better fit for groups than StackOverflow. Many people want help but often need a discussion at different levels. Also as many of us know the entire StackOverflow documents thing was a crash and burn but I personally liked it. So with Discourse as we see here especially with the PostgreSQL upgrade post, Q&A are coalesced into meaning/useful and quick to find info.

[craigconstantine]

@nicolecolter have you seen this?

[AntiMetaman]

Hmm, this is interesting. I had previously suggested the ability for users to create their own teams (preferably 5-15). If this is like that, I’m in and would love to beta test it. We use it a lot in our gaming community.

[tobiaseigen]

Thanks all! Appreciate the warm welcome to the CDCK team and interest in the Teams trial. If you’re interested, please send me a PM with your use case and we can talk. I also updated the OP with the following - we are looking for a good faith, hardcore trial by a team of 5-12 people.

@tobiaseigen

If you’re interested in committing to a good faith trial, send me a PM! This means you commit 100% to try out teams for all internal long form communications. You abandon long form discussions in your chat app and avoid using emails for the trial period. Your entire team commits to trying it out. You all deal with the first week or two of “omg, there is a new system in front of me… what do I do” and work through the challenges as a team, and then tell us what happened and your suggestions.

In exchange, we can hook you up with a free site. We will also add you to a private category here on meta where you can mix with other alpha testers and discuss ways to improve Teams.

[AntiMetaman]

Given that I’m still in the midst of establishing my Discourse community, I can’t at this point commit 100% to abandon other forms of communication (Discord). I shall however, reference what I was talking about with regards to users with a specific role or trust level to be able to create their own team (user group), and invite others to join their team or have users request to join that team.

Creating teams / clans / guilds

In many gaming communities, guilds / clans / teams, are often found. There have been other forums that have created plugins to make clubs for users. The user with a high trust level creates their own clan. They can send invites to other users who can accept or deny. Users can send requests to join the clan which the clan leader can accept or deny. I know Discourse has user groups already which a person can request to join or be invited to. Is there a way we can give permission to certain people…

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@tobiaseigen

You may have noticed that my profile here now flaunts flair - I spend half my life here on meta anyway so it’s only natural that I’ve now joined the CDCK team!

That’s how it goes

I’m now working in a 9-10 person team that might fit very well into what you’re making here. It’s open source and all-remote. My main question is whether this Teams package is intended to be used exclusively for a team, or if it can also accommodate a community forum alongside it. We don’t want to split our community forum and internals forum (i.e. Teams instance) into two different instances.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Howdy @erlend_sh

Teams is intended to be a standalone offering seperate from the community on a different URL

It is a per seat product, single forum doing both use cases at the same time is not on our roadmap

[EricGT]

@sam

It is a per seat product, single forum doing both use cases at the same time is not on our roadmap

That is useful information. Thanks.

[EricGT]

@sam

It is a per seat product

After a moment of thought a logical conclusion is that the seat would be tied to a pay structure. Yes/No? By extension that leads to what is the relation between a seat and a user. Is a new user tied to a specific seat, or are the seats dynamically assigned in that as teams are constructed and destroyed the seats go back into a central location for reuse?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

We will certainly announce our pricing structure at great detail once we launch, no point really talking about this now. If you are looking for similar models have a look at the pricing models on Slack and GitHub.

[lessless (Yevhenii Kurtov)]

Hi Sam,

this is a great undertaking! Will there be a community edition of your new product?

[Catija]

This is a really interesting development! Congrats to y’all on getting this work built and into testing!

I’m really curious to know more about it!

@tobiaseigen

Teams ships with a large number of unique features and a careful curation of plugins we find are very effective in a team environment such as policy, end to end encryption, checklist, calendar, knowledge explorer and more.

This is a really great collection of features! You say they’re unique - as someone less-versed in what’s possible in a normal Discourse, can you talk about whether/why they wouldn’t be otherwise available for a self-run Discourse instance? If they are possible already, is it the feature bundle along with a support contract a big part of the per-seat cost?

Are y’all planning on some integrations moving forward - I know that talking about that sort of stuff can be a bit difficult but it’d be neat to hear what y’all are thinking about there if you feel like you can share.

[tobiaseigen]

Not sure what @lessless means by “community edition”. Teams is Discourse so many of the improvements we are adding to make it awesome for collaboration are also going into the same open source core software and official plugins for everyone’s benefit. But there are some closed source features that will only be available on Teams.

@Catija

@tobiaseigen

Teams ships with a large number of unique features and a careful curation of plugins we find are very effective in a team environment such as policy, end to end encryption, checklist, calendar, knowledge explorer and more.

This is a really great collection of features!

Actually, most Teams features including these are available as Discourse official plugins, which you can add to a self-run Discourse instance. What makes Teams special is the careful curation of these plugins and their settings so it “just works” out of the box. It is also far less configurable so you will find it easier to maintain. We provide an opinionated, purpose-built theme with a sidebar that puts collaboration features at your fingertips. Teams also has other functionality built-in relevant to per-user pricing, including the ability to invite guest users who only have access to specific guest-only categories.

@Catija

Are y’all planning on some integrations

What do you have in mind? Discourse already offers SSO and SAML, and Official Slack integration for Discourse. These will also be available on Teams, though some (like SAML) will require an enterprise plan.

[Documentally (Christian)]

Hi, Weirdly I could not see how to PM you. We just chatted on Twitter.

[IAmGav (Gavin)]

Welcome to meta @Documentally

Unfortunately new users can’t priv msg yet. Spent a little bit of time exploring the site and post and in no time you will be able to priv msg ppl

[Documentally (Christian)]

Thanks, I received one and all seems to be well now. Cheers!

[soulnafein (David Santoro)]

Are you still looking for Alpha Testers? I’m the CTO of carwow.com
I literally typed Discourse for Teams in google because I’m looking for alternatives to long threads in Slack to discuss architectural/technical topics with the team. We are a team of about 25 engineers.