Microsoft is banning all its employees from using Slack, citing multiple reasons why they should stay away from the team collaboration app.
According to a report by Geekwire, the company has put Slack on its list of ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software, applicable to all employees. Some of the other software on the list include the anti-virus Kaspersky and the grammar checker Grammarly. Microsoft is also discouraging its employees from using Google Docs, Amazon Web Services, and PagerDuty. Surprisingly, even Github’s cloud version, which was acquired last year by Microsoft for a whopping $7.5 billion, is on the company’s dreaded list.
Microsoft is pushing its employees to use Teams instead, the company’s own collaboration app. In a statement describing the inclusion of Slack on the ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software list, Microsoft says:
“Slack Free, Slack Standard and Slack Plus versions do not provide required controls to properly protect Microsoft Intellectual Property (IP). Existing users of these solutions should migrate chat history and files related to Microsoft business to Microsoft Teams, which offers the same features and integrated Office 365 apps, calling and meeting functionality. Learn more about the additional features that Teams can provide your workgroup. Slack Enterprise Grid version complies with Microsoft security requirements; however, we encourage use of Microsoft Teams rather than a competitive software.”
Slack is popular among workplaces thanks to its team collaboration features. It’s especially popular with developers and other tech workers since it’s easy to use both online and offline. Currently, Slack has around 10 million users around the world.
Teams, on the other hand, was launched in 2016 and is considered to be the main rival for Slack. Competition between the two has been rather tight even though the latter was originally released in 2010, seven years before Microsoft Teams came around. The tech giant, in turn, officially named Slack as a ‘competitor’ at its annual 10-K report in August of last year.
