Microsoft bans free Slack and discourages AWS and Google Docs use internally | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft bans free Slack and discourages AWS and Google Docs use internally

theverge.com

38 pointsivinay23 comments

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.

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).

They don't have such a product yet

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

The enterprise version they note is secure enough but still discouraged because it’s less about security and more about perception. Why would customers want to use the Microsoft equivalent if even their employees don’t.

It's definitely not just hyperbole. "Microsoft bans Free Slack" would've been accurate. "Microsoft bans Slack" is actually false.

Ok, we've made Slack free above.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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 :/.

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.

Reblog of https://www.geekwire.com/2019/no-slack-microsoft-puts-rival-...

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

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

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

> 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?

They are afraid of corporate espionage it sounds like. If any of that telemetry is ever swapped to some random Chinese telemetry firm there is no telling who snoops on it then.

I only use my work Slack account at work and all other Slack workspaces on my personal phone. I assume this is what MS employees will do.

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.

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. :/

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