Microsoft Teams is getting a controversial location tracking feature that users may hate
3d 9h ago by lemmy.today/u/sanitation in technology from www.neowin.net
Was there ever a MS Teams feature anyone actually liked? Seems like the whole product is based on loathing.
Teams isn't made for the users.
I can't for the life of me figure out who it is for.
Management wanting to track your activity, Microsoft wanting your data,...
Features Microsoft wants to push and features companies want. It's widely used because IT departments can just buy Office 365 and have all of the office apps and support for however they're hosting the rest of their office 365 apps but that doesn't mean it's good
Teams is a part of Office365. It has been widely utilized in corporate establishments.
Doubt any mere mortals would use it as their primary way of communication.
Good to remember that the client for Teams isn't you - it's your IT department
No, it's upper management. I don't give a fuck what you're doing all day as long as it doesn't create security vulnerabilities in the environment
Lol, are you kidding? IT gets to experience the suck of using it, and of administrating it. For as bad as the front end of Microsoft stuff is, the back end is usually worse.
Wtf are you on about administering teams is braindead
It's one of the better ones, and basic functionality is braindead, but I've definitely found some pain points.
- My work requires us to use company branded video chat backgrounds 🤮. Whatever way my co-worker deployed them, they aren't available through the mobile app.
- There's a feature to create unified groups (Teams groups) with membership lists hidden from non-members. It is only available through PowerShell.
- Got users that want to use their group like a distribution list? They all have to personally choose to subscribe to incoming email. You can set the group to auto-subscribe new members, but subscribing existing members requires some basic PowerShell fuckery.
- Sharepoint backend for file sharing. Less said about that shit the better.
- If a user's display name updates, how it syncs to different places that display their name in Teams and how long that takes is inconsistent as all hell.
- Better hope you never get a ticket from your legal team to pull chat history. Pain in the ass to do, horrid fucking output format.
- No way I've found to disable the damn upsell "Get Premium" button. Granted I haven't checked in a while.
Valid complaints but its why IT teams have to fight these random ass requirements because its a trivial small seeming suggestion but takes so much time, generates so many issues. Of course that only works if your company is structured in a way where they respect ITs input.
It’s for CSuite that doesn’t wanna pay for slack but sees teams bundled in office and says “good enough”
Well to be fair slack is quite expensive, and getting worse every year. Both in price and usability.
They recently cribbed the Catch Up feature directly from Slack. I’m a big fan of that. Come up with a good feature on their own? Nah.
I mean, that has been Microsoft’s MO for their entire existence. With the exception of maybe some versions of Visual Studio, everything they have done was see what they can copy off their competitors.
Wasn’t the original Visual Studio just Borland Turbo C++ with a non-ascii GUI?
If your whole ecosystem is in azure, it kind of works. Similar to gsuite
... For the admin. It's easy for the admin. That's not the users.
I bet some employers love that shit. They are Microslop Teams‘ main customers. Making our life miserable is a feature.
Hmm...
Image generated with Microsoft Copilot
Wow, and what an image…
Should give the teams logo a whip at this point
Microsoft says that this feature is basically a replacement for physical workplace check-in peripherals, it reduces the need to manually update your status
Considering how much I have to manually fix my regular teams status, I have doubts as to how effective this will be.
It would be very useful me to know if a colleague is in the office or not without the need to message them and wait for answer.
But yes, I have to fix my status roughly once per day, so I have doubt this feature will work properly.
It would be very useful me to know if a colleague is in the office or not without the need to message them and wait for answer.
But if you know they're in the office, aren't you then going to message them and wait for an answer?
I was at Shiny Night at one of the local Seattle furry bars a little while back and wound up hanging out with a bunch of folks in really well articulated fursuits talking shop. Eventually, as it does with any group of devs, the topic drifted to the classic game of "who hates Teams the most" and unfortunately it turned out the people I was drinking with:
1- Were mostly M$ developers working on Teams doing their 'team bonding' polycule thing.
2- Hate teams more than I could possibly ever manage. I mean, you think you hate teams? You think it's unmanagable, insecure, convoluted and a pain in the ass for your IT crew? Imagine what the backend for that disaster must look like, then make that your entire day job. My god, it was a level of vitriol matched only by discussing Deutsche Bhan with a group of drunk Germans...
Users "may" hate?
Many also do not care, unfortunately.
Let's not get that Lemmy echo chamber vibe where a few dozen of us agree that millions of Windows users don't exist.
Yeah, the vast majority of people barely even know how to use a web browser. They won’t care about (or even notice) this change.
It's not like people have a choice lol what are you going to do find a company using slack
Many also do not care, unfortunately.
Meh. It's a work thing and corporate bobbleheads say I need to use it. Then they'll pay for me to wait for their mandated things to start/connect/work/do whatever. It's mostly usable enough to get my shit done, it randomly shows whatever status on my account which I couldn't care less. And the moment I log off I don't care if the place is literally on fire.
It's after all just work and nothing more. There are way more important things in life.
Hell, most people don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser
My company device already has so much surveillance on it that this won't make a meaningful difference to me.
However, given that they can't even get my activity status right, I don't see it going well. For example It sets me we idle even if I'm typing furiously in my editor, unless I go wave my mouse cursor in Teams for a few seconds. Other chat apps got this right decades ago.
It doesn't deliver messages or delivers them out of order. Unread status on messages doesn't work right. It crashes randomly. I could go on.
Fix the core functionality, Microsoft, instead of adding all kinds of big brother bullshit. I don't trust Teams to get anything right and neither should my manager.
Even better when you have multiple machines logged in.
I am simultaneously presenting in a call and magically away from my desk, soon to be while working remotely and sitting at a desk in the office.
Fucking idiots.
The activity issue finally just made me set to appear offline. I was irrationally paranoid that my manager or skip would see me away most of the time and think that I wasn't showing up for work, even though I was sitting there typing away.
The worst part is that even if I set my status in the status bar to "available" once I noticed it was away, it sometimes would just set itself back to away instantly. Opening up teams and clicking in the window seems to be the only way to get that to not happen.
it reduces the need to manually update your status, and it also enables co-workers to know that you're at work so that they can coordinate in-person meetings with you.
They're not even trying with these weak ass justifications anymore. Are either of these things an actual problem for anyone?
"Hey are you in the office" works well, too.
But IME if I am, they are just lining up at my door anyway and I can't focus on actual work. At least when I WFH, I can ignore "hey you got a sec?" until I actually do.
"Hey are you in the office" is too much social interaction for the antisocial mindset of techbros it'd seem
My status is permanently set to Away so that people don't bother me with stupid questions like "are you in the office", although for some reason teams randomly resets my status to green every couple of weeks until I notice the increase in stupid questions.
I look forward to everyone being shown as located in the major city where our VPN is listed instead of where we actually are. That's how it works for browsers and other location based functionality now.
Even without VPN, IP-based location has always shown me in all sorts of random places, sometimes even in the opposite end of my country. Guess it's an ISP thing.
This is using your office network/wifi SSID to set your location status in Teams. It’s not sharing your location when you’re nothing the office.
Also, it’s opt-in.
“Users may hate”
Sweety, we already hate everything MS. Take a wild guess…
Management on the other hand ..
Am management. Still hate it. Costs a fucking fortune, sprawls beyond any reasonable control, fucking impossible to secure, every product has its own operating model and support, it changes every month, and the notion of leaving it is absurd. It is a disease that everyone is infected with and their sales people will never let you go. Also, it's not like I can log into a central portal and see my employees on a map or something. I can't see their searches, their teams chats, nothing really. Maybe HR could if they weren't in the parking lot eating old cigarette butts or whatever it is they do.
Its like herpes.
Yep, not to mention it's a basic messaging program, but it regularly uses 1-2gb of ram on a lot of machines at my workplace. Had a coworker vibe code a lightweight version (terminal based), he pretty easily got it down to 80ish mb, and it mostly worked (the whole thing was mostly for shits and giggles, but surprisingly usable).
Teams is anything but a basic messaging app. Over the last few years Microshit kept integrating most of their office suit into it instead of keeping their standalone apps working beyond Excel and Word. Now you have chats, teams, calls, calendar, SharePoint, planner, to-do, power BI and a million other things in one place, and only 90% of them don't work properly.
Besides, the new™ Teams is pretty much just an instance of edge with 10+ tabs open den being on the amount of addins your company has. The entire app is literally just build in edge webview, its a reskinned browser with slightly more privileges.
Oh, I agree, I just found it rather funny that a random person was able to bring down teams ram usage without much trouble, something that Microsoft doesn't seem to care about. Teams really needs just to be paired back to messaging and video/audio calls, all of the other stuff just aren't used.
If it's a new Teams feature I'm going to hate it regardless of what it does. MS doesn't make software for human beings any more.
It will also introduce 50 new product-breaking bugs
I too have a hard time seeing management as human,
We aren't. When you humans are busy working, we go to the basement and eat the remants of your souls.
We also go to a lot of pointless meetings.
Basically, Microsoft Places and Teams have received workplace check-ins via Wi-Fi. The idea is that if an employee arrives at the office and connects to their enterprise network, their profile status indicator will show them as being present in the office.
Joke's on you. My work is so stingy, they don't offer WiFi to employees. Also, I've blocked location permissions in Teams, just in case.
God damn I hate this universe, why is technology a tool to create new shackles instead of breaking old ones
Because it makes the people at the top more powerful.
Location: at work.
wasnt it only yesterday that Gremlin Satya Nutella was telling employees they should not be tracking their staff?
Nutella gremlins?
Is it possible to hate Teams more?
Always.
Since teams is for connecting people remotely (office to office, office to other departments, etc) what sense does this make?
Being "in office" has nothing to do with my location.
Microsoft sucks so much.
Easier to control if your employee is actually at the office instead of working from home.
It's not like the pandemic proved most office jobs could actually be done remotely...
We have teams. It sucks. They’re going to make us use it for phone calls soon.
The phone calls part is one of the better parts at least for me) for Teams. It has it's own number, works on all the devices, can forward, and works well. I don't want to carry a work phone, and don't want a desk phone in the office (even though we have ones that connect to Teams). If there is a better solution that's 'cheaper' all for it, but seems pretty sold.
My issue with it is people using their computers for calls; we have cheap ass dell laptops and there are always echoes and lags in the audio. When they finally set us up, I’m going to make sure all my calls are routed to my cell phone.
Oh that makes sense, I typically use a headset and avoid the built in trash that most laptops have and it seems to work pretty well.
👍
Seems like malicious compliance would be using the shitty service and giving them the shitty quality connection they asked for.
And I need to have a teams mtg this afternoon, so I fired it up, and…..it didn’t work. Spent the obligatory 15 minutes on the phone with the help desk; we’ll see what happens.
You must not have ever had to get through a phone tree while you were conferenced with someone.
Complete opposite experience for my office. Calls drop randomly, consultative transfers don’t work, holds don’t always reconnect. Had none of these issues when we had Skype for Business. Even had a VoIP consultant firm come in to review our issues, they couldn’t fix them.
I was fine with teams when we only used it for meetings, team chats, and IM.
im sure there ar eother ways of tracking thier progress, like thier work/projects done on a deadline. its more or less a control issue.
Around here employers gets to pay trillions if they even put themselves in the position of snooping on employee data , like location, without a distinct need for each individual they snoop on.
Users as in (office) workers. I cast a enormous doubt that there is no living person who chose Teams over literally any other messaging app just to use it for their main way of communication outside of their workspace.
If possible: grab a router and install OpenWRT onto it, and turn it into a wireless bridge. Use the router to connect to the office WiFi, and have a wired connection to your laptop. Turn off the laptop’s wifi for good measure.
Alternatively, if work provides hard lines, bring your own router and turn off WiFi to provide a protected hardline.
There are many ways to prevent the computer from realizing what network you are on.
grab a router and install OpenWRT onto it, and turn it into a wireless bridge. Use the router to connect to the office WiFi, and have a wired connection to your laptop
A setup like that would trip our IT security. I actually killed all the phones on our floor by doing a simple packet route they didn't recognize, they have the routers set to kill all the PoE and block all data when anything they don't recognize comes through.
You have a network for employee’s personal phones and devices, correct? That still leads to the Internet, correct?
I mean, the entire point of such a network is to keep outside devices off of internal networks that have sensitive data. And because the insides of large buildings can be absolutely sucky at receiving LTE/5G data connections, employees can and will do anything needed to ensure they still have connectivity on personal devices. So just connect the router/bridge to that network, and Teams will be appropriately sanitized and think you are still at home.
Teams will be appropriately sanitized and think you are still at home.
I wouldn't count on that in our IT environment. The one constant there is: change. Whatever works one week, they'll screw around with it and make it different the week after that... I WFH and mostly on my own gear because getting things done with their supplied laptop is 50% fighting their ever-shifting "support."
At work ?
I have seen very tiny router/bridges, clear down to an Ethernet dongle with a +5v USB power feed. Quite unobtrusive.
Please don't come to GCCH.
Please don't come to GCCH.
Please don't come to GCCH.
I am curious, because the Teams hate is pretty substantial here, what are the reasons you hate Teams. I feel besides it's Microsoft (!) and it is a resource hugger plus why tf do I need a second app telling me I have a meeting besides the main one (outlook) it's okayish? Maybe because I was never allowed to try alternatives? Please, tell me
Because Microsoft, and just the constant little BS problems I'm always having with it. Which are probably a result of being subjected to Microsofts shit QA processes. They're always changing shit with it while the problems that have been there for years keep occurring. Also my work decided we don't need actual desk phones because Teams calls work just as well (they don't).
I don't think I hate teams for the same reason as most on this site. My gripe is the stability issues. Just at my department alone there are 20 different issues per teams. Some range from buttons working after a few presses to teams just bsod the device. On my laptop teams has a memory leak and which is persistent. I have to clear teams every week or it will not even start up anymore
I miss Skype. I think Zoom is better. It just worked in the browser, on a Linux host. The dependencies for Teams is icky to me.
I am logged in through vpn and use the web version. Microslop sucks
users have the ability to control whether they want to enable it or not
So just don't enable it then.
Its likely they will be forced to and it may even be enforced by group policy at some time in the future if its not already
Home users, corporate users have group police edit: policy... Same thing
Hopefully this change will get rid of some scammers who use teams to recruit for fake jobs
It won’t. IT has to set it up - which scammers won’t, and users have to enable (or at least not disable) - which scammers won’t.
Or just do your job according to employee guidelines.
☝️🤓
Controversial opinion but this is perfectly fine to enable in an enterprise environment. If you're being paid to work and you're lucky enough to be trusted to work from home its fine to force employees to have location services enabled. Not like there isnt a million other ways to see where they are.
i'm fine with company property having tracking, but as long as i'm doing my job i don't see why my employer needs to know were i am. and that's despite me preferring to work on location.
I work in a big office, I want to know if the person is in office, working from home or offsite somewhere. This feature will automatically update the status to give that info. I dont see how its hard to understand why that is a useful feature. Also I said enterprise environment its assumed these are company devices.
I have never once had an issue with this.
Know why? Because I work with responsible adults. Once you start treating adults like little kids with no agency, you’re opening the floodgates for the control schemes which finally start to affect you personally.
What could your employer do that would overstep your personal boundaries? By handwaving this one away, you’re enabling them to cross your line later. You must see that, yes? It’s clear to everyone else.
You are not doing yourself any service, even if you think you’re just “sitting this one out.”
its a power issue by the ceo, MANAGMENT.
Im glad that people in your office are responsible enough to keep their teams status updated but many don't and in a big company with majority hybrid workers this will be a useful feature and I look forward to it being enabled since im always in office.
Your comment is wild I have to ask what you think you're fighting here? How does updating a teams status to display if you're working in the office or at home over step boundaries and open the floodgates for big scary control schemes? If its a company device this changes nothing, if they want to track your location they wont be using this teams feature. if they want to micromanage you or spy on you they wont be using this teams feature.
If you can’t see it, it’s either willful ignorance or a chasm too wide for me.
Best of luck, you’re going to need it
You just have no idea and are lashing out at things you dont understand. You havent even read the article. There is no privacy issue here its not Microsoft tracking any more than they already do and its not employer tracking.
i've worked in multiple organisations of over 100 000 employees with majority hybrid workers and this has never come up. can you explain what positives this information will give you?
To see if someone's in office. Example you book a meeting and you check the event in outlook and it shows that everyone's in office today so you can grab a meeting room and do it in person.
Someone raises a ticket for an issue thats easy to solve manually and you see theyre in tbe office so you go fix it.
Someone is looking for your coworker and you check teams and see hes working over at site B
How can you not see what positive info this would give? Have you never asked someone if they are in the office today, I would find that pretty hard to believe.
So basically your team works very, very poorly.
No?
no i haven't, because i have access to an asynchronous communication medium with which i can get the information i need from people in text form. when working in international teams every meeting is online anyway and tickets are usually resolved by either development or fixes to the online system. someone needing onsite help would constitute an emergency.
the only info i need from status lines is whether someone is on vacation or not.
If only you had access to a piece of communications software with which you could ask your coworkers if they’re in the office or not, and when they’re likely to be.
Maybe MS could make one of those that worked.
Are you trying to say that messaging a co worker to see if theyre in the office is quicker than checking their status?
You're welcome to continue doing that but that sounds awful and I doubt you'll do it once this rollsout.
My team is constantly on the road and don’t live at their computers.
I doubt any of our guys actually realise you can set your status on Teams, and no one would think to look at it.
Well lucky for them they won't have to worry about it.
what moron cares about updated teams statuses? that sounds like such a painful office environment
No one cares enough to update them thats the point but its still useful to be able to check at a glance if someone is wfh or not. I'm sorry this is such a challenging concept to you to grasp.
the part that is challenging to me is why anyone expects that to actually work?
have you been paying attention for the last 20+ years now?
i want to say there was maybe a period of 5 years around mid 2000 where it did but microslop has been awful for decades
and i can count on 2 hands the number of times the issue was urgent enough to need an immediate response regardless of what middle management thinks (and phone calls worked fine)
so over working for bigcap company cultures and middle managers having too little actual work
By that logic dont bother implementing anything because what if it doesnt work.
It'll work good enough for most and better than the current status situation.
or you know stop using overpriced miroshit products
pay your workers well and treat them like adults
and cut useless middle management
sadly my company still uses ms but at least they nail the other two
You hate MS, I do as well but its not relevant to talk about throwing it all out. This is just about a minor feature release and lemmys overreaction.
ms literally pushed a vibe coded update that boot lopped multiple dev machines for a week before we resolved it
technically it was fixed same day but only because we have regular nightly images and other machines
that alone should be enough of a reason, this is just more shit on the camel’s back
but so you know I’m not downvoting you, nothing you've said is unreasonable, I just really have no patience with current tech companies and clearly lemmy is sick of ms’ shit
Why? Work from home, not work from home, the works the same. I can't understand how this changes how you work. Unless your employer is very bad at figuring out how to do it. That is the only conclusion one can come to.
Your work does a poor job, so you rely on outdated work methods. There is no other way to look at this.
If they're in the office we can talk face to face if theyre at home we teams call. You are actually beyond cooked if you're unable to understand this.
If your job is as simple as receive instruction return output then I see how this doesnt change much but thats not every job.
If you don't talk to people why even have an office? This change isnt for fully remote workplaces.
And you are demonstrating terrible work habits.
It should not change how you work. That is the problem, for some reason it does for you, meaning your work, or you, do not know how to work efficiently.
And to be fair, if your work doesn't fix this problem it really isn't your fault. They should be nipping this crap in the bud and calling it out. Re-training people and getting productive.
You still havent given a single reason. You just spout the same shit over and over as if you're some authority on the topic and we should all just believe things are the way you say they are.
Im sure you are very hard to work with and once this feature is rolled out you'll still get no one coming by your desk.
Because working from home doesn't really mean you have to be in your house as long as you're working. Just like you don't have to actually eat on your lunch break. If you can't trust me then why am I still working for you?
Ignoring that this wont update your status to "In a coffee shop" for argument sake lets pretend it does.
If your work allows you to work from a coffee shop and your status reflects that then whats the issue? If you aren't allowed then why are you working from a coffee shop. This doesnt make sense as an argument. Plenty of people have in their contract strict policy for work from home. My job would not allow work to be done outside office, home or specific sites. We have people who are allowed to work in coffee shops and airports and they get laptops with privacy screens and are told to not access sensitive information in those locations.
Then ask
I do and its an inferior way of checking their status
Two reasons:
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The feature likely won't work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that's when your boss's boss checks your location and it says you're working from home or something. And now you get written up because you're supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens--a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won't consider the limitations).
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You're assuming they're only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn't/couldn't install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).
I had a boss that would teams-call me when I was on the toilet. I don’t think it was malicious, just inconvenient. He was a dick about it though, so maybe he was watching my status.
The Authenticator app is one of the the least invasive pieces of software you could install on your phone, so you’re on your own there. But we just get a Yubikey and it’s their problem.
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Leave your device? But really you'll be able to say you were getting lunch and since you return 10mins later they'll see you're in the office. If they dont accept that then you'd be cooked with or without this feature.
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Saying neither MS or your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more is a stupid point considering that both parties already have access to more information than this feature will provide. If they are bringing a personal device its probably already registered into some MDM software for basic device management of company assets and that provides them with more control than this will. If they dont then the company is probably to small and not interested in gathering this info or doing anything with it.
Why do you want to know that? Haven't figured out how to work asymmetrically or put things into writing?
You do realise talking face to face is objectively better than talking over zoom or text right? I dont know why you keep acting this stupid all over the thread.
No. It objectively is not. It may seem like it, but for all the reasons I have mentioned it absolutely is not.
Its poor training and lack of ability to function in this space that makes you think so.
Oh yes all the 0 reasons you mentioned. How could I forget such a convincing argument.
I'm thinking that you may have a social disability and be misunderstanding. This is not for every worker. If you work better communicating over text thats fine your business can accommodate you. But majority of humans communicate best face to face instead of over text or calls. Its not to say you can't effectively communicate over those mediums.
I mentioned the reasons before.
What you are suggesting doesn't scale. It doesn't work well for large orgnizations. It also hinders smaller ones because they never learn the skills to do it more effectively.
It is a learned practice. It does take effort but the rewards are many.
Yes I talk about this as so what of an authority. I have written on this subject, measured outcomes, created manuals and guides and trained people.
If you want good talent it isn't all going to be in one place and we have the technology and tools to work with people anywhere and with some guidelines and rules: anytime. That is a huge win.
Works fine in multinationals that I've worked for. Are you telling me that if you've got 3 people sitting in the same office and you start a teams call instead of just saying lets grab a meeting room and chat about this? You're cooked bro I would love to read your shitty book and see your measured outcome.
You seem needy.
"Hey, are you in-office today?"
Been asked several times as a newer employee on a hybrid schedule.
Also gives them a polite heads-up to expect a visitor.
It's irrevelant where somebody is, as long as the assigned work is completed. Are you an insecure middle manager by chance?
Im not a manager but im just struggling to see how you habe such a narrow view of work that you think its that linear. Most roles do require inter team and department cooperation and in those cases it's nice to be able to check teams and see if someone's in the office because then you can go talk to them directly.
Why is knowing if someone is wfh or in office such a bad thing to you? Also where someone is is not irrelevant there are plenty of restrictions around work locations.
Yo, I was hoping to chat about fizzing buzzes today. You in the office; wanna grab coffee? If you prefer you can call or we can just chat on slack? Anyway I thought it would be best if we foo’d the bars in that order on project A.
Easy. No naked ping. No pressure. Question already in the open. No expectations. Will find out if able to meet in person. Will get an initial response.
No shit that is what is already done every day. Its not meaningfully different from this change other than being slower. You give up nothing by the way there is no privacy argument to be had you're using Microsoft teams in a work environment.
Why do we have a little dot next to the users name that way people can see if they're online, offline, away or busy? You can just message them and ask.
Because you don’t message them generally if they’re away; so away and busy marking helps. The difference you’re describing for not needing to check if somebody is in the office, means you are the sort of person to just show up at somebody’s desk and yap. If not, this new feature gains you no ground, as you’d still need to check if they’re available. If so, you’re already quite unlikable in the workplace.
Its funny seeing the responses on this website where everyone is twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify why its useless or so bad it shouldnt be implemented and elsewhere the response is cool that sounds useful
I dont know what to tell you, people talk in offices, I'm sorry thats so upsetting to you. Human beings like to talk for work and for social reasons. You can disable the feature and cry when someone vists your cubicle but you can't deny it will be useful.
I can deny it will be useful to me. And I can do so without any disparaging comments. I am glad it will be useful for you.
check teams and see if someone's in the office because then you can go talk to them directly.
The fuck you do. You send them a message asking if they're in the office, and if you can come distract them for a minute about NNN.
Don't be the asshole who breaks people's concentration because your question is more important for you than their work
For some people maybe this is true but for most it isnt. There are more people where this approach is useful vs not. The feature makes sense and is useful.
There it is. I was right. "Talk to them directly". That demonstrates a huge problem in your work environment.
This is how side decisions get made. This is how things skip getting written down. This is how you break protocols, and risk other people wasting time to do some properly because you just took it up with someone. It kills asymmetric work. It make growth difficult as your office expands to other countries and offices. Documentation gets worse, responsibilities get worse.
This is what ruins work from home.
No not really it doesnt necessarily lead to any of that. Communication is human to human in many businesses around the world and it will be that way for many more years. Asking if someone is working from home and waiting for a reply is a pointless waste of time. This will be a welcome change for everyone except developers.
Yes it is a waste of time to ask if someone is working from home.
Because it shouldn't matter.
If you have to ask that question, your company is doing work from home wrong.
Why does anyone need to know where I am? Makes zero sense. And luck has nothing to do with working from home.
Also, I remote into work. There are no work owned devices at the places I choose to work from.
So the only locations they have are Azure, or the data center that houses a desktop environment depending on where I am remoting into.
This is a stupid useless feature that if you work remotely correctly only introduces more problems.
Cute that you think they dont get your location from your connection to the VM
What VM? Or Which VM I should say I guess.
You are saying the VM on the WVD would report my IP location I am connecting from?
No one needs to know where you are. You aren't the only person in the world. Different people different usecase.
I think the biggest issue I have with this is the framing. For 99% of workers, your company is exploiting you by making waaaaay more money from your work than they pay you in wages. Employees aren't "lucky enough" to work from home. Capitalists are lucky we work for them. Additional erosion of privacy is not ok. This is a thinly veiled effort from companies to control workers more so they can be exploited harder. That's it.
Agreed. It’s updating your status to in-office and updating your office room location.
Many hybrid workforces already have software that’s doing this as part of desk hoteling.
If you’re online and not in the office, it’s not updating your location to your home address.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Some of the other responses here make it sound like they’ve never signed in with a badge before.
Agree as well. Some of the hostile responses here are so insane I have wonder if they've even worked anywhere at all.
There's so much to hate about Teams and Microsoft. Them trying to make the work status feature not completely useless isn't it.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Just imagine what we could achieve if we could somehow communicate with eachothers verbally!