A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
So… no change?
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.
Shocker.
So people will know in which company building you’re in? Who gives a shit lol
And somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.
I don’t get it. Why would it matter that Teams knows where you are working? If you need to hide from your coworkers or your boss then maybe it’s time to change company?
On the other hand: if Teams is using Wifi to correlate your position you could mess with it by exchanging the access point positions, ie exchange your bosses AP with the one in the cellar.
I can see one legitimate application for this, specifically for accountability during an emergency. It’s one more thing to tell whomever is checking where to look for people and only if it’s actually reliable. I doubt that it would be reliable enough.
Yes, I wouldn’t go so far and trust MS applications in emergency cases :D
Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.
Don’t be surprised when IT tries to move into your house thinking it is an office building
Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.
I’ve gone back and forth with my opinion on Teams, but now I agree with you. Earlier there was a lot of shit talk about it, and it just worked for me with no problems. After all of the additional bloat (now we have Copilot in it) it crashes all the time.
It never crashes for me - because I have to use the browser PWA app, because the native app doesn’t work on Linux that great.
On the other hand, the UX is absolutely terrible.
The native app for Linux is no longer supported anyway. PWA is the only official way now.
And yes the UX is terrible. Especially the search function, it always finds unrelated things and almost never what I’m looking for. Same thing with Outlook (the real outlook and the ‘new’ one), OneNote and Sharepoint.
It is my #1 and pretty much only usecase for copilot. I think copilot for office is not great but searching for my stuff it does do very well. Paying $30 a month to fix something that should have worked in the first place is a bit mad though.
Yeah people hated it for being Microsoft for such a long time that by the time it actually sucked people had been crying wolf for so long it was hard to believe.
To me it has always sucked compared to something like Slack. It has really low information density for example with its huge bubbles around everything. Multi-tenant switching was a really slow and painful process unlike slack which simply has a sidebar for quick switching, and it creates a huge garbage dump in sharepoint when people upload stuff to a chat.
I can’t disagree about multi-tenant, I just used Firefox containers for that because it was only for working with vendors so it wasn’t always on. I think they fixed that in 2022 give or take. The file thing is common with slack, there’s still a garbage dump of files.
I think the information density is a matter of taste. Given the popularity of google products, macos, and gnome and that sort of thing, its safe to say there is a huge market for people who prefer giant whitespace to actual content.
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
To be fair, Microsoft never had “Don’t be evil” as their motto.
The company your work for is Microsoft’s biggest client - not you… Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.
Hold on. Let me say this.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
I work in IT support and I’ll say that this isn’t really anything that couldn’t be done before, is just more visible. Office 365 logs what device and app you’re using to connect, the IP address of the requester, what you were requesting from which service… The list is long. It’s a massive amount of data that largely, nobody cares about.
The only time I even look at that information is when some security software flags some action as suspicious, then, and only then, do I even bother.
If you go on vacation and suddenly connect from Florida when you are normally connecting from the UK, I get a notification. If you suddenly start using a well known VPN, I get a notification. The logic is for security. If you suddenly log in from a new place, then it’s more likely that the login in question wasn’t you, and you’ve been hijacked. That’s literally my only interest in your location. Most bosses don’t give a shit either.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
Sure, in principle. Getting a new boss though… do you have any extra lobs laying around?
I work in IT
Aaaand here we go, of course you thought finding a new job was a viable alternative.
I can’t find a new job. I literally hate my current one. My entire management team is full of micromanaging dipshits.
I keep applying for jobs and nothing happens.
I’m not saying it would be easy to find a new job, just that if you’re in that situation, you need one.
I am glad I work where nobody monitors teams because that would be stupid.
But exactly how will this work for the people who are actually using modern computing? So I am on Azure Virtual Desktop for one instance of teams, and another that I use for calls on a personal laptop, maybe on their wifi but always with a VPN because we habitually run vpns.
So where am I?
List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely
I think the takeaway from this article, and I may be wrong, is that Teams uses location to report where you’re logging in from. This is something most corporate networks report anyway for safety.
This isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of Work From Home employees. Most have home offices, and most will make their team or managers aware if they’re logging in from a new location, or everyone is using a robust VPN to connect anyway so it hardly matters.
This is going to fuck over people who are exploiting WFH to say, work two jobs (Yes, it is more common than you think) or people who went on vacation with their family and didn’t want to take PTO so they are trying to log in to join team meetings from the hotel lobby or something.
If your company is so draconian about your login location and you’re hiding where you’re working from, maybe consider changing habits or changing employer.
This is going to fuck over people who are exploiting WFH to say, work two jobs
can you explain how this would catch people working two jobs esp if they are both WFH jobs?
It would fuck over people who are straw employees where someone else is doing the work but that’s kind of the opposite scenario. There was a story recently about a lot of San Francisco tech startups all hiring the same programmer thinking he was exclusive to them (stock options involved?). Apparently the work was getting done, but didn’t meet their expectations of the type of employee they were hiring.
Honestly, I can’t really explain how this will catch people not working in general unless the employer is utter shit at security and doesn’t make an effort to hold regular team calls with video on, and doesn’t have regular productivity metrics.
But assuming that you work in Half-Ass, Inc. and their only way of verifying you’re at home in front of your computer is using fucking Teams then I guess you could log into your work meetings while sitting at the front desk of the Car Wash and just keep the volume muted every time a car goes through the wash.
If your Teams connection shows you’re logged in from Shady’s Secret Car Wash then I guess your boss might start getting suspicious.
In general, that type of multiple job work is both jobs being work from home. I don’t think anyone home officing a desk job is going to do minimum wage work on the side.
I don’t think anyone home officing a desk job is going to do minimum wage work on the side.
I thought so too until I caught one of my team members doing exactly this.
I wouldn’t have said or done shit either, if he was actually pulling off both jobs successfully, we all gotta survive, you know? But he wasn’t getting anything done, and the other members of the team were all overworked and doing as much as they could, it was unfair to everyone so I had to confront him.
I didn’t even make threats or say what he was doing was unacceptable, I just said he needed to help his team more, especially if he wanted that promotion and more responsibility like he kept asking for. He resigned a week later from the office job. I’ll never understand the logic either.
It gets strange when you are using their cloud services though. You don’t really need a VPN to use teams web interface, it should be secure by default. Will Linux leak my location when using teams? I don’t know.
Or if I am using virtual desktops in azure, often with a secondary hop to a remote desktop somewhere that is running teams. At this point what are we logging and what location am I really at?
As a side note: all of this effort by microsoft is annoying. Bring your own device is so freeing and cost saving, but it makes the situation I described above.
I work on windows all day, but I don’t personally have any. And I like it that way.
all of this effort by microsoft is annoying.
Most of their changes seem like pointless busywork to keep dev teams employed.
Nobody asked them to “simplify” right-click menus by changing copy and paste commands to icons, I don’t know what that accomplishes either. I don’t know what meeting they had where they decided that the lower left corner for the start-menu access was out of style and we now need to put it in the middle, but here we are.
I could go on for hours and hours.
Another feature no one asked for.
Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.
Not by workers, but it was asked for.
You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
No. I’m sure managers asked for this…
Eh, most companies that allow Work From Home are already tracking your login location and use their own robust VPN anyway that sends your login location to validate who you are. Teams is just trying to sell what most companies already do as a “new feature.”
I can’t really think of a way this is going to harm most users unless you’re already trying to scam your employer by vacationing without using your PTO and trying to show up to meetings from the hotel WiFi, or working two jobs. (Both of which I’ve had to deal with managing WFH teams.)
Glad I work at a place that wouldn’t give a fuck as long as I’m getting shit done. This sort of bullshit undermines how people feel about work and likely harms productivity more than it helps (as is tradition with micromanaging people instead of setting them up for success and giving them the space they need to do their job).
Also, people who actually are slacking will find so many ways around this anyhow that it won’t actually matter to them because they already don’t care and are probably smart enough to get around it.
In a lot of ways, I have the opposite of micromanagement, they really don’t care what the hell I am doing as long as I’m delivering my projects effectively.
Sounds like you work at a place that trusts you to do the job you were hired to do.
My take is: If they don’t trust me, wtf am I even doing at a such a fucked up place? Then find a better place to work.
The sad thing is that some orgs that start off with healthy environments can slowly erode into really toxic environments and it’s like a frog boiling in water.
Sometimes it can happen very quickly - all it takes is one person of enough prominence being replaced with another, and something that took years to cultivate is shredded in weeks/months.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen both of these happen up close and personal. Sometimes it’s not always a viable option to try to pick up and move to another job…
Companies also get bought out by other companies and then change drastically overnight.
Yes, without question. That’s usually a fast-track to a highly toxic place, because often the people that they have acquired are viewed as just somehow being there accidentally, or worse, illegitimately, because the new management had no role in finding them, hiring them, and working to create/preserve a culture with them.
Also, many weak managers just want loyalists and that kind of personality just worries that they didn’t get to vet people so the people they have bought won’t be sufficiently loyal…
In my current job, I don’t mind doing a little overtime or working a weekend every now and than. They don’t care what I do, as long as it gets done. They don’t care that I go to the gym during office hours. I’m happy and I’m passionate about my work.
But if they started doing shit like this. I’d be working 9 to 5 and not giving a shit if work gets done or not. I’d become a drone and I’d be looking for other employment.
Fancy that? Don’t you love it when your work treat you like…wait for it… an Adult. Rewarded accordingly, help accountable accordingly. Who’d 've thought! 🤔
No kidding. What dystopian hell do people work in??
