Disney has dropped Slack as its company-wide collaboration platform of choice in favour of Microsoft Teams.

Status reported a leaked internal memo detailing that the entertainment and hospitality behemoth plans to discontinue using Slack’s messaging services by the end of Q1 FY25, which is a few months away, because of a significant leak of messages and documents earlier this summer.

Business Insider followed up on this story last week by reporting the proposed move to Teams, which has catalysed employee concerns about leveraging Microsoft’s popular platform as an alternative.

Disney CFO Hugh Johnston wrote in the memo:

I would like to share that senior leadership has made the decision to transition away from Slack across the company. Our technology teams are now managing the transition off Slack by the end of Q1 FY25 for most businesses.”

Johnston mentioned that phasing out Slack in “more complex use cases” could take additional time, with the transition expected to occur a quarter later.

The announcement follows claims by the hacking group Nullbulge that they had breached Disney’s internal Slack messages over the summer. Wired reported that the hacking group accessed over 1.1 TB of internal content, including 44 million Slack messages and 10,000s of documents that encompassed internal projects, financial positions and strategies, and customers’ and employees’ personal details.

The Wall Street Journal reported reading some of the leaked Disney Slack files in July. A Disney spokesperson informed the Journal that the company was investigating the incident at that time. According to the Journal, the breach transpired after a computer belonging to a Disney software development manager was compromised. Data was stolen from both public and private Slack channels, but private messages remained unaffected.

“Much more information, training resources, and best practices for optimal work-related collaboration and reinforcement of policies regarding secure handling of sensitive information will be shared over the coming weeks by your respective technology teams,” Johnston wrote.

A Business Insider source outlined that some Disney employees were disgruntled with the prospective move to Teams. The source shared screenshots with Business Insider from the anonymous workplace forum Blind, which mandates users to have an organisation email address to access and post in a specific company channel.

Several employees expressed concerns that cost-saving measures drove the shift to Teams. They feared losing longstanding Slack integrations and archived content, which they believed could reduce productivity.

Slack’s parent company, Salesforce, declined to comment to Business Insider, while Disney and Microsoft hadn’t yet responded to the publication’s requests for comment.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff underlined Disney’s ongoing use of Salesforce products across its operations despite the Slack discontinuation, such as by Disney retail workers and customer service staff, during last week’s Dreamforce event.

Benioff was also interviewed by Bloomberg late last week about the story. “Our security is rock-solid,” he said. “This is really important. Also, there’s no finish line when it comes to security. But companies have to also take the right measures to prevent phishing attacks and to lockdown their employees from social engineering. So, we can do our part, but our customers also have to do their part —  that’s extremely important.”

Agentforce Turns Slack Into An All-In-One Digital HQ

Last week at Dreamforce, following the integration of Agentforce into its platform, Slack announced it was transforming into much more than a simple messaging app.

Previously called Einstein Copilot, Agentforce is designed to enhance worker productivity by providing AI-powered CRM insights and issuing action instructions to Agentforce agents.

Teams using Slack can now take advantage of Agentforce’s generative AI capabilities, enabling them to access insights and receive task assistance directly within the collaboration platform, streamlining workflows and boosting efficiency.

Microsoft Announces Copilot ‘Pages’ For AI-Powered Collaboration

Microsoft has announced Copilot “Pages”, a new offering within Microsoft 365 that enables AI-powered project and document collaboration.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of AI at Work, introduced a new feature that enhances the Loop project management platform. He describes it as “a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration”.

This solution allows users to share Copilot Pages through a single link, enabling instant collaboration, similar to how shared Word documents function. Furthermore, users can embed these Copilot Pages into other documents or pages as interactive components, streamlining project workflows and fostering seamless teamwork.



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