
Microsoft bans employees from using Slack, discourages AWS and Google Docs - mromanuk
https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-bans-employees-from-using-slack-has-aws-and-1835770652
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xemdetia
This 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
Also, 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.

~~~
philshem
I 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)

~~~
dgellow
> And no one admitted that we were even eating the dog food.

Do you know why? That seems to be a weird thing to refuse to admit.

~~~
philshem
It was presented as saving license costs by not using the standard product.

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kawsper
> 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
I 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
That's an incredibly judgemental attitude. Being in college doesn't mean you
have to be able to write to perfection.

~~~
rchaud
Most 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.

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MichaelApproved
Can 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
This 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
True 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
"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.

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darkcha0s
This 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.

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jaxbot
This 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
"Do as we say, not as we do."

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vichu
This 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)

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Lazare
A 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?

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scarface74
Microsoft bans the non enterprise version of Slack because of compliance
reasons.

~~~
darkcha0s
I 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
That 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.

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heavymark
They 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.

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leemailll
Why MS prohibits the use of Grammarly?

~~~
CSMastermind
Because it will have access to confidential information. It's essentially a
keylogger.

~~~
leemailll
I agree, totally forgot about this.

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jitbit
Even GitHub is on the list, which makes me think it's an outdated document
maybe?

~~~
laumars
Github 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.

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RocketSyntax
I'd be very surprised if microsoft doesnt acquire slack in the next 2 years

~~~
dbbk
The CEO Stewart Butterfield has already said he doesn't intend to sell, based
on his bad experience of selling Flickr to Yahoo.

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dogma1138
Going 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.

