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.
Good.
Anyone who gets in bed with a company that uses these products deserves all the shit coming their way.
Until all companies start doing this.
Good thing we don’t need to rely on software companies for video chat.
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.
I think it’s more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
Apparently it’s dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
So… no change?
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.
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.
It’s more about control than it is about productivity. Has been for a long time.
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.
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
It updates your location status to “in the office”
It also changes to “away” if you don’t move the mouse for long enough.
Anyone looking to these as workers not doing their job, is looking in the wrong place.
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.
Shocker.
Electron is amazing, for smaller teams, individuals or whatever BUT a trillion dollar company cutting corners on native apps, even for their own platform… come on
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
So people will know in which company building you’re in? Who gives a shit lol
The problem is they’ll know when your not in a company building. So people can’t WFH even though their boss isn’t watching them at the office anyway.
If you’re outright refusing company rules like that then yeah you sorta run the risk of justifiable sacked lol
It’s not refusing so much as taking advantage of a grey area. The work is still getting done.
It’s not very grey if they’ve been told to get into the office and they aren’t doing that
It’s grey if their boss can’t tell if they’re there or not without a Teams notification. Stupid rules are meant to be ignored.
So it’s grey the same way speed limits are? I dunno man, it seems pretty clear cut to me
Well speeding can arguably make driving more dangerous so not really the same thing. No one is being hurt by people doing the job they can easily do from home, from home. If anything danger is reduced because they’re spending less time on the roads. Stop bootlicking.
That sounds like an issue with the the arrangement between the employee and employer to me.
Yeah, but not everyone has the flexibility to just hop to a different job the second their current one becomes unsatisfactory. Some people have to make do with what they’ve got.
It sounds like you are defending taking an in person job with the intent to deceive your employer by working at home. Because I still fail to see a circumstance where it would be a problem unless the employee is trying to be deceitful to work from someplace unauthorized.
If there’s no reason for them to need to be in the office other than that their middle managers don’t know how to do their job remotely then you’re damn right I’m defending it. If you need a teams notification to know your reports aren’t working from the office then it means they’ve been getting their work done from home and there’s no reason they need to be there. Many places went WFH during Covid and are now dragging their workers back to the office needlessly. Stop bootlicking for corpos.
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.
You not working?
AWS down
Oh ok, don’t worry
And somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.
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
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.
And this is useful to me how? A fucking retard HR person who wants you sick at work making everyone else sick too is probably who came up with this genius idea.
No, I want my design completed and my team happy. LOL today someone complained about having no excel in a machine that people normally don’t use. I suggested to install libre office and no one complained. In the past I had suggested libre office or open office for various reasons and I would get looked at funny or laughed at or otherwise ignored. Now thanks to Microsoft and the power of AI, libre office is a contender!
Yeah, I had ms office up until June. With all of their trash, I’m finally leaving excel.
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.
That particular data is meaningless in all cases
Apparently some people pretend to be at the office when they’ve actually stayed at home
