No matter what strategic initiative your organization is driving, subject matter experts (SMEs) are always at the center because of their deep knowledge and expertise. And while well-known, veteran SMEs are often consulted, rising SMEs should also have the opportunity to step up and share their wisdom. Diversifying contributions in this way prevents burnout, improves employee recognition, and creates a continuous transfer of knowledge as your SMEs come and go.
In this release, we’re introducing SME Auto-Assign so you can take a more systematic approach to SME engagement in Stack Overflow for Teams, empower rising SMEs to contribute, and ultimately improve site metrics like median time-to-answer. We’ve also added the ability to convert helpful Enhanced Search summaries into first-party Q&A discoverable and reusable in your instance.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) in Stack Overflow for Teams are people linked to tags they have expertise in so they’re notified of new questions and can provide prompt, trustworthy answers. This workflow efficiently captures, validates, and distributes SME knowledge to your community. SME Auto-Assign now simplifies the process even more—it automatically assigns SMEs to tags based on how much reputation they earn so quality contributions increase with less manual effort. Learn more about how it works below.
Up until this release, SME management has been manual in Stack Overflow for Teams to allow for more admin control. SME Auto-Assign now gamifies the process by giving admins the option to set a predefined reputation threshold that makes sense for their community. Once users earn this reputation threshold for a tag, they’ll automatically become a SME for that tag. You can learn more about the feature settings and how to configure them here.
Stack Overflow recommends having at least 2-3 SMEs for your most popular tags since higher SME coverage leads to better answer rates, more Content Health reviews, and better overall community health. In a future release we’ll have better SME coverage reporting and automatic SME demotion based on inactivity.
So admins and moderators can monitor how Auto-Assign is impacting SMEs, we’ve added a new SME page accessible from Users > Subject Matter Experts. The “Assigned by” column tells you whether the user has been automatically or manually assigned a SME status. We will update this page in future releases based on customer feedback.
End-users can track their progress toward SME status for tags on the Homepage Tags widget. They can also opt out of being a SME for auto-assigned tags on the Homepage tag preferences module.
With this release, all Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise sites now include OverflowAI features. New OverflowAI administration options allow admins to more easily configure OverflowAI features in your Stack Overflow for Teams instance and give you more control over which users and User Groups have access to Enhanced Search. If you have questions about these changes, contact your account executive or customer success manager.
Enhanced Search uses AI to summarize the most relevant search results from your internal community and the broader community on stackoverflow.com into comprehensive answers. With this release, you can convert helpful Enhanced Search summaries into new questions and answers that are discoverable and reusable in Stack Overflow for Teams.
For additional details on the improvements above and other updates with the latest release, view the 2024.7 release notes.