Microsoft Teams Will Start Tracking Office Attendance (tomsguide.com) 86
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker's location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you're actually there or not. From a boss' perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.
It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
The reason you don't enjoy work (Score:5, Interesting)
If you were happy, you would do better work, and more efficient work. Unfortunately, "better" and "more efficient" are not success metrics (in many cases).
Re: The reason you don't enjoy work (Score:3)
Re: The reason you don't enjoy work (Score:5, Insightful)
Then have the balls to confront them individually and if necessary fire them as opposed to pussy-footing around by telling everyone to do better.
The good people start asking themselves if it's them fhe broad generalisations are targeting and get uncomfortable, annoyed, frustrated or a combination of those.
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Sounds very awkward to deal with.
And as a thought experiment, if forcing every employee to wear an ankle tag solved the problem, would that justify forcing every employee to wear an ankle tag?
So I just wonder if a soft PC location logger feature is proportionate.
I guess there's already reasons for suspicion, so would this additional data collection be excessive?
Re: The reason you don't enjoy work (Score:2)
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Sigh, true, I guess the future needs to become decentralised?
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Then the problem is you. Collective punishment was abandoned in civilized countries millenia ago.
Re: The reason you don't enjoy work (Score:2)
Except when it comes to gun control, I suppose.
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And don't tell me you can't fire them. If you're a manager in the US, you can fire them. Period. Your company's lobbing ensures that option is available. (To those outside of the US
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Maybe this is why our supervisors don't have to be shitty to us where I work. We have metrics that make it immediately obvious who's doing what. For example, I just had a performance review, and I meet a month's obligations in a week. So nobody has to ride my ass or count the minutes I spend taking breaks.
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My manager is an expert at doing my job. I cannot express how much that helps.
Taking Office 365 literally, again. (Score:5, Funny)
I already posted this earlier, but Microsoft should really stop taking Office 365 literally.
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Don't worry, once every 4 years you'll get a day off ;)
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Well, not EVERY 4 years, think of 2100!
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Just a rounding error
I connect via LAN (Score:1)
I connect via LAN both at work and at home, and connect via VPN from both. But I don't have Teams installed on my work machine, too distracting. I have it installed on my work phone which is always using mobile data and never WiFi. What is it going to do in that case?
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Say an employee with attention deficit or sensory processing disorder uses Teams on a separate device as a way to improve productivity on their primary device. Refusal to accommodate these conditions can get an employer in trouble under the ADA and foreign counterparts. If you end up fired for this, ask an equality lawyer about your options.
Seems agressive and unecessary. (Score:2)
My company just tracks badge swipes and enforces it so compliance with return to office policies isn't really an issue. We are also allowed a certain amount of flexibility, so it's not that onerous.
Every single year since I've been alive (Score:5, Insightful)
And every single year I've heard more people freaking out about trans girls in sports or violent video games or all these gosh darn immigrants or any one of a million things that have nothing to do with the 50 trillion dollars that have been taken out of our pockets and put in the pockets of the 1%.
I am so fucking tired of stupid mother fucker is falling from moral panics. And I am so fucking tired of being made to compete in an endless race to the bottom because it's so easy to trigger tribalism and bigotry.
The funny thing is and this is why you are all so fucking stupid, if I mention tribalism that's cool and I can get modded up but if I mentioned bigotry that's not cool and I get modded down even though they are effectively the same thing in this context.
Do you notice how easy it is to manipulate you? And I'm just some dumb fuck on a dead website. Imagine what a billionaire with focus groups can do.
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Congrats, you've managed to not mention anything on MICROS~1 spying on people
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Congrats (Score:2)
This is another example of things in your life and mine getting worse because people at the top want them to be worse even though everyone else doesn't.
The fact that you cannot draw that line, that very obvious line from point a to point b, is why we are all completely fucked.
You're inability to recognize wider patterns and react intelligently to them and the sheer number of people out there just like you who do not have those critical thinkin
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The world has gotten worse for anyone that works for a living and better for anyone who owns shit for a living.
Horseshit. I think over the years you've just grown increasingly unable to separate concepts.
We still have more flexible working now than we did before the pandemic. Over the years my job has turned from a strict 9 to 5 to a one with increased flexibility. Even those people covered by return to work mandates have more flexibility in working hours than before.
I don't know how you managed to link tribalism, moral panics, racism and transphobia into work. But I will give you the benefit of doubt and assumed yo
It's the opposite (Score:2)
This is another case of the ruling elite intentionally making your life worse for minor and Petty benefits for themselves.
In this case everyone who has to go into work for real reasons has more traffic and everyone who doesn't has to spend their mortal lifetime trapped in a little fucking box for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours a day all because the super rich want to maintain property levels for commercial real estate and fire some people without paying comp
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And every single year I've heard more people freaking out about trans girls in sports
Which to normies means "sending boys into the girls' locker rooms".
How about you stop doing it, and then we'll stop freaking out? Deal?
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The funny thing is and this is why you are all so fucking stupid, if I mention tribalism that's cool and I can get modded up but if I mentioned bigotry that's not cool and I get modded down even though they are effectively the same thing in this context.
You mod yourself up with multiple accounts. There is no other explanation for your consistently +5 posts as you are not insightful nor notable enough to justify such bullshit. Anyone who has been here for a while can see the effects.
WFH chess... (Score:2)
I use a wired connection. Check!
Actually, I'm retired. So checkmate, you MSFT fucking losers...
Fully remote by contract (Score:5, Informative)
I'm fully remote. When my contract arrived a few years ago, even though the job was advertised and interviewed for as fully remote, it had the usual BS clauses saying that the company has the right to ask me to work from the office. Not only that, but they reserved the right to temporarily make me work from any office they had in the world.
So I turned around and said: "Which part of FULLY remote you don't understand? I'm not signing this."
Luckily, I've got a pretty unique skillset and they really wanted me to work for them, so they removed all the offending clauses.
Now I don't even need to go in for any silly monthly socialising days. Total freedom.
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Thanks for sharing what is probably one of the best feel-good stories of the month. Seriously, we're always hearing about how the system is grinding everyone down. It's easy to get really depressed and believe it all.
As someone who wrote a book on totalitarianism said, the antidote is to show that there's at least one voice that is different. One voice that can stand apart from the crowd. One voice that makes everyone rethink, hey, there are options and possibilities. So, thank you.
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Ah, cunning.
“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
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I see feel-good stories like this all the time. Usually they're even feel-gooder than this: The guy who never went to school or had any kind of training and is making millions off a taco truck, Zuckerberg hired someone with no experience into a $700,000 salary, or how "Harvard dropouts" are creating the next big tech company (that one was right here on Slashdot.)
The stories certainly make you feel good, that's why the media pushes them, as platitudes.
Re: Fully remote by contract (Score:1)
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I'm also fully remote, in a company that is generally skeptical of remote work. But like you, my contract says my position is remote, with no fine-print caveats. My entire team is also fully remote. Every one of them would quit rather than move to a city where the company has one of their offices. Over the past 3 years, we have become known as one of the highest performing teams in the company. So much for the nay-sayers who assert that you can't be productive if you're not in the office.
Opt (Score:5, Insightful)
>"tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
That is a misuse of the term "opt-in". That is like saying I am requiring you to volunteer.
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Not sure about this specific setting, but it probably does make you click-through some kind of agreement or greyed-out checkbox. At that juncture, you could shut the device off and tell your employer you'll find another job.
So the choice is effectively, for most: Run this software, or start down the path to homelessness. Sounds a bit like that mark in Revelation, doesn't it?
Against all evidence (Score:2)
Studies show that MANY people get more done in the office. They're not anxiously looking at the clock to see when they can bolt out so they can get on with their real lives, and they don't burn out from commuting.
I've been saying this for literal decades, since the 90s, honestly: people at Microsoft AREN'T stupid, so when they do stupid things, it's ON PURPOSE.
Someone has read all the same evidence I have and they've determined that they'd rather have people LESS productive but MORE under control. Maybe it'
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My company refused to give us any data they have on how much more "productive" or "collaborative" we are in the office which is their gaslighting response to why they want us there 4 days a week. However I had heard from an admin assistant to the C-suites that she had seen these numbers, and they are well aware that people are much less productive and they just dont care. They would rather have chair warmers than actual work getting done, presumably for city tax kickbacks or to justify building purchases so
Re:Against all evidence (Score:5, Informative)
A colleague of mine went to the hardware store and bought a pair of industrial ear-muffs.
Open-plan absolutely is a drain on productivity. Casual gossip, overhearing others on calls.
Work recently asked us to return to the office 3 days a week for 'collaboration', which is codeword for dump a bunch of stuff that is someone else's responsibility on me. Just let me do my fucking work in peace. Oh and the commute 2 hours a day on public transport...
As a salaryman in my 50s, I am tired of the bulltish.
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It's maddening, and also, kinda fascinating what, the reasons why they insist on this, could be.
I asked ChatGPT to speculate in a psychologically informed way, on what the reasons could be. Naturally your point about control came up a lot (many people think at a concrete level and so can't understand having a team which they can't "see").
I'll quote this last reason it churned out, which is again about capacity for perception:
Truly post-conventional thinkers can hold paradox: that productivity can increase a
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. (Score:2)
Re:This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. (Score:5, Informative)
Search mouse jigglers; there are USB ones that the machine thinks is a mouse, and ones that sit on your trackpad and simulate a finger. And they're cheap!
However neither will make your machine appear to be on office wifi.
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A covertly planted 4G device in the office might let you bridge into the network. You would need to stick it somewhere the maintenance guys can't find it, though.
Maybe you could bridge through a co-worker's device somehow, if you can find an accomplice who is regularly in-office.
that's stupid (Score:5, Informative)
I can configure my home wifi with the same ip network, mac address, and SSD as work. Explain how they're going to determine that I'm not in the office.
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It's cute that you think this is how localisation works. That said this is Microsoft so I'm actually not sure that you are far off being able to fool them, I'm sure this will be implemented by some underpaid H1B in the dumbest possible way.
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There is honesty in both statements. Remote work comes with the absence of stupid coworkers, distracting you with stupid questions they should have figured out the answers to about ten years ago. Peace and quiet to get stuff done without interruption.
Why the need for mouse jigglers and the like? Because as a remote worker you have to be at your laptop the full 8 hours, otherwise you are "slacking off". Go to the toilet and someone calls? You aren't working. Go to the kitchen for coffee and someone calls? Yo
Depends on whether you're in customer support (Score:2)
Why the need for mouse jigglers and the like? Because as a remote worker you have to be at your laptop the full 8 hours, otherwise you are "slacking off".
In theory, that's an argument for adding a "bathroom break" button to groupware more than for RTO. Managers would get metrics to find employees who misuse the break button in excess of what labor law encourages employers to allow.
Go to the toilet and someone calls? You aren't working. Go to the kitchen for coffee and someone calls? You aren't working.
Ultimately, that depends on the nature of the position. Do you work call center or something else?
You don't answer an email right away? You can guess the answer.
I'm in development, not operations, so my manager tends to be more accepting of my habit of dropping offline for an hour at a time to avoid the 23-minute interruption penalty associate
In unrealted news (Score:2)
Microsoft wants to be hated more (Score:3)
Apparently they are starved for attention, and any attention is good, right?
You admin already knows where you connect from (Score:1)
Big deal (Score:1)
If I EVER get approached... (Score:2)
...with some crap like "We've noticed that you weren't in the office on random date..."
It'll be hot-spot exclusively from that moment on.
am i missing something here? (Score:2)
My employer already knows whether i am in the office or wfh.
Most other jobs seem like they would as well.
Remember when Microsoft cared about developers? (Score:2)
But now they're just implementing every single application they can, cutting out developers developers developers developers developers.
This is nothing but ... (Score:2)
... surveillance. And calls for hacks, perhaps firewall rules blocking the service or anything to make sure this will not work.
FUD (Score:2)
Tattle? WFH is between you and your line manager, there's no rattling. It's either ok to WFH or not. Teams is just setting a location like ye olde IM clients did. Took a while but teams is drip feeding basic features.
At this point, I am genuinely curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
For you hard-core Microsoft users, what could that corporate monstrosity possibly do to you that would make you FINALLY say "they've finally crossed the line! I am done!"?
Microsoft started out (in the PC context) providing a good command line based OS called MS-DOS that mostly just did what a simple OS should: provides some basic functionality to allow applications to run with a bit of system abstraction so the same code could run on systems with varying hardware configurations and sparing developers from having to code everything to-the-metal.
When the Mac threatened to up-end their world, Microsoft provided a crappy (but in-color) alternative they called "Windows" which eventually grew-up to be what a modern OS should be (the aforementioned hardware abstraction, but now aided by drivers etc) and the support for multi-tasking with the OS managing the shared resources. With Windows 3.11 they finally finished the move to a modern OS by adding networking support.
Follow-on updates were generally nice gradual improvements most users CHOSE to upgrade to as people moved up to Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 2000 etc always getting better graphics, stability, support for new hardware and newer standards, etc.... until Windows XP, Up until this moment, nobody FORCED customers to do anything, they CHOSE to move to newer versions because the newer versions offered enough value to convince them to part with their money... it was a good value proposition. With XP Microsoft started requiring the OS to "phone home" to the Mothership (but only for installation). This was the moment Microsoft made it clear THEY were in control of your PC... since it had to phone home to authorize the install, this meant that at some future time (which did indeed arrive) they could shut off the authorizing systems and you would no longer be able to re-install that version which you had purchased and if you wanted to keep using your PC you would be FORCED to buy a newer version.
THIS was the dividing line in time. From this point on, Microsoft went full-on arrogant and presumed THEY own your PC and THEY can jerk you around.
With every subsequent release of Windows, Microsoft has FORCED people to upgrade, FORCED hardware obsolescence (driving countless tons of perfectly good electronics into landfills), FORCED software incompatibilities (new OS version -> new Microsoft app version -> new Microsoft app file formats...) and made the OS phone-home more invasive. When they started snooping on keystrokes and mouse movements, people got over the shock pretty quickly and continued using the newer versions like some sort of dysfunctional drug addicts encountering a new side-effect. Now with forced online accounts, "cloud" storage/backups (oooooh, it's so FLUFFY!) people are losing sensitivity to who has their data and where it's stored and who might access it....
Just where is the limit on how evil Microsoft can go before people say "nope. This far, but no further"???
I'm personally disgusted by how much of corporate America (and particularly governments and Medical facilities) have gone along with all of this to the point where HIPAA and even Constitutional rights are no longer in-force. When governments and medical facilities put your private and sensitive info into systems running Windows and constantly phoning home to the Microsoft Mothership and servers, just where is the guarantee of security and privacy? Just what redress is available if any of it is compromised, and will anybody even know if it is compromised? Do people at Microsoft or in government even acknowledge that such things ARE "compromises" when they become design features? Just how secure is YOUR data in a Microsoft cloud if a very powerful and important Microsoft customer (the US government? China's communist party?) demands Microsoft grant them access? Certainly Microsoft values those big customers more than it values YOU and possibly your small business. Are YOUR small business's intellectual property secrets safe and secure
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Just where is the limit on how evil Microsoft can go before people say "nope. This far, but no further"???
The good news is that it's closer than ever. The bad news is that the exodus is no better.
People don't run Windows because they like their OS or spend their days enjoying the operating system by itself. Operating systems are a means to an end - they run other software, and people choose operating systems based on the software they need to perform other tasks.
For all the millions of apps on the iOS App Store, Windows has a hundred applications. They do everything from weather modeling to hardware programming
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You run the one or two Windows programs that you need on a Windows LTSC VM running in a nice, padded VirtualBox cell.
1. Windows LTSC isn't sold retail; one has to acquire it either part of some complicated business licensing deal, or on the high seas. No shade in either direction, and I do ultimately agree that it's the best solution available, but either way is a massive barrier between this solution, and people moving away from Windows...to also use Windows.
2. The user is still, ultimately, running Windows, with all of the issues involved with that - licensing drama, patches and updates, principled freedom elements, pri
So you're telling me... (Score:2)
... that you can't tell if a user is working from home based on productivity metrics, but have to resort to this instead?
Cheap and easy to work around (Score:2)
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What are you trying to achieve? If your company is using Teams to monitor your presence, tricking the system in NOT knowing you're in the office will make you join a list of people never showing up for work.
If you are given an opportunity to meeting with HR, are you going to tell them: "I'm using this unauthorized dongle on my company laptop to disable the company wifi such that the company IT cannot know if I sit in a company building, or if I didn't show up for work". Again, what is your expected outcome?
How does this make sense? (Score:2)
First, if you're in the office, the boss can see you. Assuming, of course, that the boss is in the office.
second, who spends all their time in Teams? No work gets done there - if I'm not actively using it, it is closed.
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First, if you're in the office, the boss can see you. Assuming, of course, that the boss is in the office.
Exactly, assuming that the boss is in the office. The boss will obviously be working remotely, and won't be able to check anyway as they're not by their computer
second, who spends all their time in Teams? No work gets done there - if I'm not actively using it, it is closed.
All the meetings are in Teams, and since that's all the bosses do, they assume that that's what everyone else does as well.
We have regular meetings, project-startup meetings, pre-meeting meetings, post-meeting meetings. Meetings to see if we need to have a meeting.
In the end it gets so bad that we have to hire more people to go to the meetings so
If a company doesn't know where it's workers are.. (Score:2)
my worry is teams crashing (Score:2)
I once had my boss call me asking where I was and, I was at my desk, teams just randomly decided one day to stop working, now I get a little bit paranoid anytime that app isn't present in my taskbar.
Whenever
Not really new stuff... (Score:2)
I worked for a HMO from 2000s to 2010s. During my time there, we consolidated to a single building and were issued new badges that contained a RDIF that could be read remotely.
Every couple of minutes security would 'ping' the building and see where everyone was in the name of safety and security.
One day I had a gastro-issue and spent a lot of time in the restroom, and to my horror, there was a knock on my stall's door from security to see if I was okay.
After that, I would leave my badge at my desk while in
Do I get a work phone for free? (Score:2)