Discourse for Teams (Alpha Testing summer 2020)

:heart_eyes_cat: thanks for validating our choice of name! Youā€™re going to love Discourse for Teams.

Yup! Iā€™ll get in touch via PM to hook you up.

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Alpha tester here as well :slight_smile: and big discourse fan for a while

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Is this still open for more testers?
This might be something cool to experiment with when moving from Slack -> Discourse. Our main community runs on Discourseā€™s Business Plan, but most of our internal team still resides in Slack. Slack is a pretty good team-software(Especially since private messages and all of that sort is so organized) and Iā€™d love to hear how Discourse for Teams and Slack will compare. @tobiaseigen it would be pretty cool if you can follow-up on a little more information about whatā€™s different from the normal Discourse and Discourse for Teams, and how well itā€™s suited for a team that may potentially move from a Slack environment. :+1: Iā€™ll have a chat with our CEO and see if heā€™s interested. The schedule for our team is pretty jammed right now, so thereā€™s a chance we may not be able to test, Iā€™ll wait and see. Additionally, is the free hosting going to be permanent or limited-time? If we were to test and the ā€œfree periodā€ ends, itā€™s likely that we wonā€™t be able to support paying for two instances and itā€™s going to end up being a remigration to slack, which Iā€™d like to avoid. Iā€™ll want some more info on this too.

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Hi @Chaboi_3000! Thanks for checking in. I :heart_eyes_cat: your cat with crown avatar. Definitely reflects who is in charge in my house!

We are launching Discourse for Teams soon and are just about ready to start getting the best kind of feedback - feedback from paying customers! That said, your use case sounds interestingā€¦ I will send you a PM to give you a preview so you can start thinking about it together with your team and spin up a site. Until we announce the launch, weā€™ll keep this topic open and are happy to respond to PMs or emails to support<at>teams.discourse.com from folks who are interested in learning more.

We donā€™t see Discourse (or Discourse for Teams) as a direct competitor to chat apps like slack and mattermost. As you know, Discourse is a forum platform. As such, it facilitates asynchronous collaboration and discussion in paragraphs. Itā€™s also your teamā€™s long term memory. Thereā€™s always going to be a role for chat, video calls and other modes of synchronous communication, but Discourse for Teams will be a valuable addition to any team.

Discourse for Teams comes with a 30 day free trial, which we have been extending on a case by case basis for as long as we are getting valuable feedback to help make the product better and it makes sense. We found that this works out very well for alpha testers who sign up with the understanding that at some point in the future they will have to get a paid subscription, and who appreciate the per-user pricing structure that favors small teams.

Many people here on meta have sites with many users and are already very experienced with setting up discourse sites and customizing them for their needs with private categories, preferred plugins, etc. You may likely be happier continuing with a business or enterprise account or self-hosting.

Discourse for Teams is a new offering for folks who donā€™t care about all that and are just looking to spin up a totally private instance that is already optimized for team collaboration.

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We launched Discourse for Teams today, so closing this topic. Thank you so much everyone for your help getting us across the finish line.

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