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I suggested Stack Overflow on premises for my employer. The result is that I was allowed to set up a open-source Q&A-Platform for the company and if the acceptance is high there might be a budget for Stack Overflow on premises.

Since there is no real open source alternative to Stack Overflow in my opinion (yes, I'm a fanboy), does Stack Overflow have a data migration tool from one of the open source Q&A platforms so that you can easily switch to Stack Overflow on premises later? (platform -> Stack Overflow)

I know there exist alternatives to Stack Overflow. Currently I'm considering the following platform:

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  • You want to know if StackOverflow is able to automatically migrate content into their system from other open source Q&A platforms?
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 21:11
  • 3
    @Trilarion yes, exactly. migration path: some Q&A-System to StackOverflow
    – user3606183
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 22:29

2 Answers 2

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With the caveat that I'm on a slightly different team and am not super familiar with the tooling here...

Given that we're talking "on premises" here, I assume you're primarily looking at the Enterprise tier of Stack Overflow for Teams.

In general, we recommend creating content organically, and you might find that you learn what works better and what doesn't as you champion and adopt another platform to start with. But, we have in the past worked with clients to migrate existing Q&A data from their systems, so that's something we could explore if/when the time comes. It's not fully automated due to the wide variety of systems and setups out there, but someone from our Customer Success team would work with you on that.

Having said all that, we do also offer a free 30-day trial of the Basic tier - private Q&A, but hosted on stackoverflow.com - if you want to give that a go instead of setting up something in your own environment.

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  • "to migrate existing Q&A data from their systems" were there free/opensource Q&A systems, which Q&A data was really hard to migrate or really easy? Could you drop some names or is it top secret?
    – user3606183
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 23:05
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    @user3606183 It's not top secret, but honestly each platform does things a bit differently and there's a bunch out there, so we pretty much have to approach each one individually anyway.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Jan 28, 2020 at 17:35
  • @user3606183 I guess you can always look at the public SEDE Database schema to get an idea what to expect in the SOE instance.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jan 28, 2020 at 20:07
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The answer is no, twice.

  • There is no open-source alternative to Stack Overflow's private offerings. The closest you can come is Stack Overflow for Teams, but it depends on what you're actually attempting to accomplish with something like that. From your brief description it does seem like this tool would be something you want, so I'd recommend you explore that instead.
  • The data for Stack Overflow is dumped on a regular basis, but you're responsible for rebuilding it and putting it back into a coherent display. No tool exists to reconstruct Stack Overflow data (which is CC-By-SA either 3 or 4 depending on what you believe or how you extract it) into what is the Stack Overflow UX (which is still proprietary).
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  • Technically they (the OP) can run sqlcmd to load any data they have in their own instance of Stack Overflow Enterprise. I don't expect this to be a supported scenario but there is nothing keeping them from trying. Not sure if that no is a bit too strong?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 20:29
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    @rene: We've already established that the OP doesn't have an instance of Stack Overflow Enterprise. Therefore, that doesn't even apply. From what I read from the OP, they're trialing the SO Enterprise offerings. Teams may be a better fit for this - especially since I doubt they also want all of the additional questions from Stack Overflow. Gut tells me that this is meant to be seed data to kick the tires of the product as opposed to be something that's actually...used...since that's all just found on Stack Overflow anyway.
    – Makoto
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 20:33
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    I read the question slightly different I guess. They want to start with an open source Q/A first and once that got enough traction, migrate to SOE, taking the data they collected from the Open Source Q/A with them.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 20:41

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