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Microsoft bans employees from using Slack, discourages AWS and Google Docs
- Lazare 7y agoA bit clickbait. MS bans and/or discourages, where appropriate based on what's employees are working on, using tools that do not meet security policies, like crazy browser plugins that literally snoop everything you type. Slow news day, I guess?
- MichaelApproved 7y agoCan the submission title be fixed to make more sense within the allowed character count? The article title is "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Has AWS and Google Docs on a 'Discouraged' List" Suggestion: "Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Discourages AWS & Google Docs"
- opencl 7y agoThis title is wrong, they ban the non-enterprise version of Slack and encouorage the use of Teams over the enterprise version. The real change that should happen is changing the link from the Gizmodo article to the Geekwire article it links to that actually contains this information.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoTrue but you can only fit so much info in the title. How would you suggest the post, even the geekwire post, be titled on HN? Even an ellipsis at the end of the current title would make much more sense.
- opencl 7y ago"Microsoft Discourages Employees From Using Slack, AWS & Google Docs" is shorter and seems more accurate because of Slack not actually being banned. The actual bans all appear to be for legitimate compliance reasons rather than "don't use competitors", even Github is banned “for Highly Confidential types of information, specs or code” though they presumably have an on-premise instance of Github they use for that.
- dogma1138 7y agoGoing back to the old days when then only smartphone you could use as an MSFT employee was Windows CE based I see. Granted it lasted for only a few years but it annoyed a lot of people.
- kawsper 7y ago> along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker That one makes a lot of sense, it's basically a keylogger in your browser, that's also a recommendation I've made a lot. If you need to use their service, use their web-version on their website, and paste in the text you want to check.
- rchaud 7y agoI see ads for this all the time, and it's absurd to me that it's primarily marketed towards native speakers of English. All the ads have college students writing essays. If you're in college and you can't conjugate properly, I don't even know what to say.
- dbbk 7y agoThat's an incredibly judgemental attitude. Being in college doesn't mean you have to be able to write to perfection.
- rchaud 7y agoMost people write terribly when they're freshmen, including me. A big part of the college experience is learning how to write well and write persuasively. You get better by doing it repeatedly and having an instructor provide feedback, even it means getting a few Cs and B-minuses along the way. That's how human beings learn.
- leemailll 7y agoWhy MS prohibits the use of Grammarly?
- CSMastermind 7y agoBecause it will have access to confidential information. It's essentially a keylogger.
- leemailll 7y agoI agree, totally forgot about this.
- scarface74 7y agoMicrosoft bans the non enterprise version of Slack because of compliance reasons.
- darkcha0s 7y agoI work for a big company (also technology, but not same area as MS), and we also ban slack for the same reasons.
- posix_me_less 7y agoThat makes sense. However, I've noticed that some free products are more tolerated than others, like Trello. I wonder why that is - one can suck out data from Trello cards just as well.
- dbbk 7y agoSeems perfectly reasonable for Microsoft of all companies to be on the Enterprise version.
- jitbit 7y agoEven GitHub is on the list, which makes me think it's an outdated document maybe?
- laumars 7y agoGithub is only on there for sensitive content - which makes total sense. Basically this article can be summarised as: > large organisations have company policies about which tools you can use to protect their IP from being leaked Microsoft isn't alone in that department either. Lots of businesses do the same. It's just a natural part of compliance for any large organisation.
- xemdetia 7y agoThis is a weird non-article to me. It sounds more just like a CISO policy with SDLC components to provide reasonable guidelines to use the systems they already use and support. If you had a company hosting all of your source code on a private GitLab and you then found out a bunch of people were using the public GitLab, you would be annoyed. You have to set some guidelines about what people use in very large organizations.
- dgellow 7y agoAlso, I think it makes sense for Microsoft (or another company) to use their own products (such as their Teams service as a replacement to Slack). Best way for the company to know what their customers experience.
- luckylion 7y agoThat depends, I think. If your own product isn't as good as the competition to the point that your employees prefer using the competitor's product, you might not want to react to that by banning it, but by looking what they do better and improving your product. The reason given in the article is solid, though. "Don't share confidential info on systems we don't have control over/trust in, especially if they are controlled by a direct competitor".
- mruts 7y agoPresumably, banning your competitors’ apps will provide greater incentive to make your own apps better. Not having any knowledge of your competitors apps is the problem, not the banning part.
- philshem 7y agoI dogfooded[0] once and don’t remember any channels or mechanisms for our feedback. (Of course the devs would see crash reports.) And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- darkcha0s 7y agoThis sounds extremely clickbaity. Of course MS will discourage its own employees to use a cloud other than its own (which makes up a huge portion of its total business). The 'prohibited' section just sounds like sane steps for any business to take; copy pasting business secrets into a blackbox translation service hoping they don't save what was pasted seems like a pretty big security risk.
- spork12 7y agoUh... This should suprise no one since microsoft competes with all 3 of those things. Teams, Azure, and Office.
- heavymark 7y agoThey ban certain versions of Slack that are not secure enough, they allow the enterprise version (though like most companies building competing products, it's discouraged over their own software.
- jaxbot 7y agoThis is SOP at most Big 4. It does strike me as funny, though, that MS would ban Slack/GDocs, that Google bans basically all non-Google cloud products, yet both companies are trying to convince other large firms that cloud is the future, on prem is dead, and that their data is safe with them. Seems hypocritical.
- posix_me_less 7y ago"Do as we say, not as we do."
- vichu 7y agoThis was discussed previously on HN[0] before being subsequently flagged down for being rather misleading even after a title change to mention that it is "Free" Slack that is being banned. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250426
- RocketSyntax 7y agoI'd be very surprised if microsoft doesnt acquire slack in the next 2 years
- dbbk 7y agoThe CEO Stewart Butterfield has already said he doesn't intend to sell, based on his bad experience of selling Flickr to Yahoo.