
Microsoft bans free Slack and discourages AWS and Google Docs use internally - ivinay
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/22/18713270/microsoft-slack-ban-aws-google-docs-prohibited-list-details
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CameronBanga
A bit of a hyperbole on this. Slack is allowed for example, but only the
enterprise edition which allows for them to meet compliance regulations.

This sort of policy is pretty typical at any organization of size with a
proper legal team.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I wonder if Slack lets organizations do on-premises (for compliance purposes,
as you mention) e.g., as GitHub Enterprise does (many companies don't want to
keep their raw source code in someone else's cloud).

~~~
xchaotic
They don't have such a product yet

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Kind of surprising, to be honest. Business communication could be more
valuable than source code to a bad actor.

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tanin
They gave two reasons, which are risk of security and eating your own dogfood.
Those seem reasonable.

Can anyone explain what the point of this article is? I read it and can't see
one.

~~~
profmonocle
Discouraging AWS also makes financial sense. Why give Amazon its profit margin
when they can use Azure at cost?

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eganist
This may be one of the more clickbaity articles that's crossed the wire in the
world of compliance, and Tom Warren's background at Deutsche and Morgan
Stanley until 2011 unwinds an ignorance defense; he knows how these compliance
policies work.

dang, can we de-clickbait the title? Or does it currently survive HN's
policies?

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benbristow
Doesn't surprise me Grammarly is banned. The whole thing just screams
'keylogger'. Send us all your keystrokes in return for grammar corrections,
deal?

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thunfisch
Had to try out Teams at work recently, because the corporate IT wants us to
switch over from Slack. I'm working in operations for a daughter company of
corporate IT. Tried it. It's a joke compared to Slack. Horrible UI and calls
dropped all the time, combined with 90s quality. In the case of an incident (I
work remote) I cannot rely on Teams at all.

So, maybe some of the microsoft employees feel the same about Teams, and
that's why they still use Slack? Interesting though.

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richliss
Fair play for the dog fooding on Teams.

Simple solution on Grammarly - MS should buy the company. It’s a definite
example of a tool to make SME’s more effective and I’d love to see it rolled
into Office 365 rather than the current cost.

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BossingAround
Slack, Trello, Grammarly, free-tier GSuite, and other tools are gaining access
to some highly privileged information at a lot of companies... It's just a
matter of time when something bad happens because 'you gave us permissions to
all the data in the TOS you signed' or something similar.

I personally dislike all of the above, but am forced to use some of the tools
:/.

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heavymark
Always silly to force employees to use your own software. It was better or
even close the employees would use it. Instead they should promote using the
best so they know how to improve their own. I understand banning free slack if
it’s a security concern but saying they recommend not using the grid is just a
poor practice.

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davidgerard
Reblog of [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/no-slack-microsoft-puts-
rival-...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/no-slack-microsoft-puts-rival-app-
internal-list-prohibited-discouraged-software/)

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ZhuanXia
Companies that big have maintain a weird balance between a strategy tax and
eating your own dogfood.

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polskibus
What is Github running on? Isn't it AWS? If so, are they migrating to Azure?

~~~
profmonocle
GitHub isn't cloud-hosted, they have their own infrastructure:
[https://github.blog/2017-10-12-evolution-of-our-data-
centers...](https://github.blog/2017-10-12-evolution-of-our-data-centers/)

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justinclift
> The Grammarly Office add-in and browser extensions should not be used on the
> Microsoft network because they are able to access Information Rights
> Management (IRM) protected content within emails and documents,

Oh the irony.

Microsoft exfiltrates telemetry/data for all of it's product users, but
complains when others do the same to it.

Has Grammarly "pulled a Microsoft" and not given meaningful options to
completely disable it?

~~~
CDSlice
Does MS actually include or access data from your emails and docs when they do
telemetry? I thought it was more stuff like what apps are being used and what
you use Cortana for and stuff like that. Which isn't great but also doesn't
pose an IRM risk.

~~~
justinclift
They (at least used to) include things like docs when uploading crash dumps
and similar.

Bit of a problem when it's in a medical or other security sensitive setting.
Patient data, etc. :/

