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.
Well i guess i am lucky because my laptop remains on site and i connect to vdi and then rdp to my laptop. (When working from home) so the data will be meaningless. At least in my case.
As always it’s the worst product that got the most marketing that gets used by everyone.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Apparently it’s dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways
Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it’ll send a notice to the boss that you’re being remote
Meanwhile, they cannot or will not add useful features like…being able to have more than one fucking person share a screen. This is after YEARS of lockdown.
And don’t get me started on how basic their chat “feature” is. I mean…have they even bothered to look at Slack at all? And it’s not like Slack is the only one they might look at…how about Matrix/Riot?
Nope, it’s almost like they just know millions of users are stuck with their craptastic solution because it’s bundled into the rest of their stack and enterprises are going with it no matter how much it sucks balls.
Jokes on them! My company made everyone remote during COVID. It worked so well that they sold the corporate office buildings. We are all remote permanently! As long as I work my scheduled hours, they don’t care where in the world I am.
We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.
Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.
I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.
Lucky bastard
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.
hahaha I love how ass hat CxOs VPxs still believe that people at a desk in an office means work gets done… lol. I see people at their desks still achieving diddly squat.
CxOs and VPxs have more money that they know what to do with. It isn’t about getting work done, it’s about making you miserable.
I mostly work from home ever since Covid. But I live reasonably close to the office and go in every once in a while. Usually it’s for something like “team building” or meeting some people deemed “VIPs” (lol) or whatever the fuck. It’s not always voluntary.
I have to mentally steel myself for getting very little done on days when I’m in the office. And nearly everyone else I work with does the same thing. It actually adds to the stress because that work load doesn’t get any lighter for not being able to get to it.
The reason for all the lack of work? Well, there are longer in-person lunches. There are all the impromptu “pop-ins”, the hallway chats, the talk while waiting for some coffee, the extra meetings on the schedule because “in person”, etc…all that adds up to very little planned work getting moved forward. You might say there are the benefits of catching up and the occasional serendipity from a random snatch of conversation you eavesdropped on, etc.
While doing this a few times a year might have some benefits (but hard to quantify), I’m quite sure it’s not worth doing every day, so I don’t. Thankfully I have the option.
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 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! 🤔
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…
No kidding. What dystopian hell do people work in??
Are people just not going into the office without telling anyone? Like, who is this actually affecting?
Also, if they have to VPN into their company network, like assume many do, won’t that register as being in the office anyway?
I’d view it as more of the opposite: a tool built into the Teams suite to tattle on who isn’t complying with Return to Office policies.
VPNs would depend a bit on configuration. I know my ubiqiti router will let me dump VPN traffic into its own vlan (with dedicated IP range), so it would absolutely be possible to tell it apart from local traffic. At the same time, I’m pretty sure my workplace has all site network traffic VPN’d to the home office, so I’m not if the same logic would apply…
Trust me, if your employer wants to know if you’ve been coming into the office or not, they can easily find out without needing Microsoft Teams to tell them about it. They can see what IP address your machine is connecting from. And if you work in a building with secure access they could also just pull your badge-in history to find out if you’re actually there or not.
Oh, my employer already can and does track compliance via badge-ins, so they definitely know when they’re getting a return on investment from the corporate real estate.
I hadn’t thought about the connecting IP address though, that would absolutely be logged.
I hope Teams announces when my CEO and other executives are not in the office. Just to level the field.
Hah, it will almost certainly have admin options that allow high level people to turn off that feature.
Teams/outlook has been doing this for a while. This is likely more for making it easier to see who is in the office to coordinate in person stuff like meetings and lunch.
If you want to be creeped out by Teams and other similar services, it can
- Detect if a conference room is in use even when not being used for a teams/zoom call.
- detect your voice and attach it to a transcript.
- detect your face to assign you name to a teams meeting in a conference room with other people in the room.
Labor should organize and tell management if they don’t get their heads out of their asses they might lose them.
Maybe I’m dating myself, but it still seems incredible to me that a relatively small update to the location features in one piece of software triggers news articles about the broader societal implications.
Software has too much power over our lives.
Maybe, but M$ has had quite an impact over office life for quite some time, and it seems like nearly every org is still paying the M$ tax, even after all these years. Teams is part of that stack, and while I don’t know anyone tech-savvy that actually likes it for anything it supposedly solves, it gets used anyway. It is terrible as an IM client. Only one user at a time can share a screen, so it’s terrible at any real collab, also. But it integrates with Outlook for scheduling meetings, so…
In addition, it seems like it is almost intentionally user-hostile when it comes to setting up prefs, like disabling incoming video as a default. This is a feature I’ve seen asked for over 5 years ago. When everyone was stuck at home and sometimes on rather slow/unreliable networks, Microsoft makes you disable incoming video on every single new Teams session, from all the geniuses that felt they were important enough to have their camera on all the time for no real reason.
Now you’d think they would have adapted to something like this, and turned this around very quickly at the beginning of Covid, as not only was it requested from users, but it would make a lot of sense (and maybe it lightens their servers load, too? Although I imagine video feeds don’t get streamed through their servers?) and probably be a decent workaround to having audio properly work on slow/bursty network connections, etc.
And yet…I still don’t see the feature as an option. I think I saw an answer about some setting that could be done globally or in a policy, as if that is really the answer. Again, it seems like it is software aimed at being sold to control freaks who also care nothing about the user experience of their captured user base. So, 5 years later, I get to disable incoming video on each call if some inconsiderate person has their video on.
And it’s a terrible piece of software at that.
Good luck with that. I work from home, use the unofficial Linux client for Teams and my status is always offline. 😆
I despise this software so much. The boss seems to be at least a bit open to ditching it, but I haven’t fully convinced him yet. 🥹
I actually wouldn’t mind this at all. Where I work, we have an office but most people are only in one or two days a week. I try to keep to a schedule, but some weeks I have to move my office days around. When my schedule changes, I update my Teams location so people know where I am, but I wouldn’t mind opting in to do it automatically.
But then again, my boss doesn’t really care where I do my work, as long as it gets done. Not everyone has the luxury of a boss who isn’t an asshat. If you are working in a place where you have to hide your work-from-home time, you should be looking for a new job.
I’ll be interested to see how this works: my “office” is on my home network. We use ZTNA for most internal services. My company already knows where I’m at when I’m using internal services; I guess with this new feature they’ll know if I’m on guest wifi somewhere instead of at home?
