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.
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.
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 $30 a month to fix something that should have worked in the first place is a bit mad though.
You might just not be noticing the crashes because it likes to restart silently. I’ll only notice it because sometimes it happens when teams is active on my other monitor and it auddenly disappears. Might be auto update, or maybe even a “we know this app gets worse over time so let’s just restart it regularly as a solution”.
Yeah people hated it for being Microsoft for such a long time that by the time it actually sucked people had been crying wolf for so long it was hard to believe.
To me it has always sucked compared to something like Slack. It has really low information density for example with its huge bubbles around everything. Multi-tenant switching was a really slow and painful process unlike slack which simply has a sidebar for quick switching, and it creates a huge garbage dump in sharepoint when people upload stuff to a chat.
I can’t disagree about multi-tenant, I just used Firefox containers for that because it was only for working with vendors so it wasn’t always on. I think they fixed that in 2022 give or take. The file thing is common with slack, there’s still a garbage dump of files.
I think the information density is a matter of taste. Given the popularity of google products, macos, and gnome and that sort of thing, its safe to say there is a huge market for people who prefer giant whitespace to actual content.
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ 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
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
To be fair, Microsoft never had “Don’t be evil” as their motto.
Bill Gates was an asshole from the start. Happy to use freely available stuff from the early computing community as well as using his school’s resources to build either DOS or BASIC and then acting like he had built it all with his own resources when ranting about free software. To be clear, I don’t gaf about using free resources to build something and make money from it, but his hypocrisy and anti-competitive BS makes that aspect worse with him.
So it was always shit, it was just that once upon a time, they actually had to make good software that ran on very limited hardware in addition to their anti-competitive BS, and then had a period where they kept trying to make good software but didn’t realize yet that they didn’t need to (like windows ME was pretty much universally panned, but it didn’t drive people away from windows in general).
I think it was win 10 that I first felt like I was in conflict with my OS. Like in win 7, I’d spend time looking at each update’s kdb entry to decide if I wanted it (and skipped the nagware ones about win 10 entirely, for example). In win 10, I had to jump through hoops just to be able to control when it applied updates on my own timeline, not MS’. Win 10 was the worst for resetting settings, like I get it set up like I prefer it to be, then a few updates later I’d have to do some of them again. Though tbf, I don’t recall that happening in the last few years, but other worse enshitification has settled in since then and now windows never even touched my current main machine.
You not working?
AWS down
Oh ok, don’t worry
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
I think it’s more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
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 somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.
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.)
