Q:

What’s Happening With Channels? 

Like we have done with other ongoing projects 1, 2, 3, we're going to try to provide regular announcements about Channels.  For those who aren’t aware of what Channels is, we're working on:

a feature of Stack Overflow for organizations to have a private & secure space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured apart from public Q&A. Channels are for organizations both large and small and do not in any way affect public Q&A.

The response to the initial announcement was overwhelming, with over 2,500 signups from people telling us about their organization, and that they were interested in using Channels for their team.  We have been pretty quiet since then, but I'm here to tell you a bit about where we are at, and what's next with Channels. 
Since the announcement, the team has been hard at work figuring out everything that needs to be done in order to get Channels up and running.  Most of this has been on the stuff that's hidden from view.  It's the backend core architecture to get us an internal version to test on.  We've gone from pushing the limits and trying to break things, like Nick Craver load testing SQL Server by putting 10k schemas and 1.5 million tables into one database to see what would happen, to actually breaking things...accidentally when Channels code was pushed into production.  Over the past month, we were able to get a very rough internal dev version of Channels up for us to starting testing with, and after a ton of work we successfully got Channels in an isolated environment for the real dogfooding to begin. 
As I mentioned, we have a rough version of Channels for us to test on.  Now, when I say rough, I mean rough.  Our current version of Channels looks a bit like this:

We have a Channel switcher at the top of the question list to navigate between public Stack Overflow and private channels.  This can also be used when switching between Channels to ask a question. 
The switcher to get between Channels was put in place for our test environment, but this is by no means what the beta version is going to look like or how it will function.  Our primary focus, up to this point, has been on how to get the core architecture working.  While we have made progress, there is much to do before we're ready to release Channels into the wild.  We're now shifting to think more about what features will be needed, as well as design and integration on Stack Overflow. 
What's next? 
First up, over the next month or so, we're going to be writing a series of blog posts about the work that's going into Channels.  This includes insight into our thinking on the product, why people have told us they need Channels.  We're also planning on sharing a lot of the challenges we've been facing, including issues around navigating between public Q&A and private Channels.  As well as a dive into some of the architecture needed to make it run. 
Before allowing external folks into Channels, we're hammering away at our version to break and fix everything we can.  Our plan is to open it up for some initial alpha testing in late-December/early-January.  Kristina Lustig, our UX researcher, will be looking for those interested in alpha testing some of the early versions of Channels.  Early alpha testers will be expected to commit a substantial amount of time and feedback to the Channels project, including in-person visits to your office by Kristina and the PM of Channels, Chance Heath, and other feedback sessions.  We'll be reaching out to some of those who initially showed interest in it in the next couple of weeks. 
Over the course of the next few months, we're hoping to have a better idea of timeline for beta testing of Channels.  In the meantime, keep your eyes open for the blog series that starts in the next week or so. 

A:

Why is this tied to Stack Overflow? 
Surely the scope for Channels is much wider than just programming Q&A even for businesses in the software industry. 
I understand that "Stack Overflow" is seen as the major brand here and has the recognition factor and that you're aiming this at software development teams.  However, will that cause problems in the medium to long term if Channels takes off? 
I don't really expect you to change direction - I'm more after an idea of the business logic behind this. 

A:

We would love to subscribe to the alpha, but there some questions that need to be cleared up before we would commit to put our knowledge (and thus quite some time) into SOC. 
Points here are from the invitation mail:

Free use of Channels for the entirety of our alpha and beta tests.  Okay, and then?  Before we spend days of putting information in, we have to know what it means in a few months time when everyone has to start paying for the service. 
Note that we have already devoted extra attention to our platform security, so we are confident that your data will be safe.  Where does the data reside?  How 'safe' is it?  What laws do apply?  Are there separate data centers for regions other than US? 

Other questions:

Can we connect our customers too?  What if we do want to make it less private (say, readable for non-registered users and Google)? 
How sure can we be that investing time won't be a loss?  As an example all the time users committed to make Documentation work, which was eventually killed? 
How much is there available on the API services side?  Can we make our own integrations? 

A:

What thought has been given to data exports?  For example, one of my team leads asked what happens if we try the three months of alpha and decide we don't like it.  Or, what if we go through the whole alpha and beta then find out the price model will be outside of what we'll be able to use from the company's budget? 
Being able to export what we've done if we want or need to leave is very important, but hadn't been fully thought out in the original post yet.  Has this been further refined?