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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.

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.

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.

Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways

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?

Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.

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.

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?

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.

Microsoft's products are no longer usable.

Not safe, not sensible, not smart.

I hope Teams announces when my CEO and other executives are not in the office. Just to level the field.

Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.

Shocker.

Another feature no one asked for.

Here I am working remote in my basement like a dumb motherfucker when I could have been anywhere else

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.

Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.

To be fair, Microsoft never had "Don't be evil" as their motto.

So people will know in which company building you're in? Who gives a shit lol

The company your work for is Microsoft's biggest client - not you.. Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.

And somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Sounds useful? Weird to imply the purpose of this is to expose people not in the office. The people who care about that already know.