Sneaking in a work from home day could soon be a bit trickier thanks to a new update coming to Microsoft Outlook.
The email provider is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to spot which of their co-workers or colleagues is currently in the office, and therefore possibly free for a quick meeting or able to reply to a message.
The update will use the Work Hours and Location information stored within Outlook to offer up this information, meaning there may be some awkward conversations if your colleagues believe you to be in the office.
In its entry in the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the company notes that the feature will be “always on”, meaning there may be no getting around what it represents as your office presence.
Wouldn’t your coworkers already know you’re working from home by, you know not seeing you at the office?
When I worked in an office, most of my team was in other offices across the world. But we had to be in the office for that TEAM BUILDING
That’s… incredibly dumb.
Even worse, it’s completely real. It was the common situation for me before corona. Also driving an entire day for a 1 hour meeting.
I had to read this like six times, because it was so illogical my brain refused to comprehend.
My “office” is a network of interconnected multi-story buildings. It’s actually really convenient for me to know if I need to go meet someone in person or just use video.
Sometimes we have a room booked ahead of time and I learn they are wfh when I get to the empty room.
That’s just poor common courtesy by your coworker. If you have a physical room booked and they are WFH they need to tell you so you don’t waste your time. You shouldn’t be relying on teams status
Yeah, that’s what the meeting invite RSVP is for.
Does your RSVP have options for remote vs in person? My options are “accept”, “decline”, and “tentative.” If I want to tell someone I’m remote that day, it needs to be a separate message.
You can respond with a message included. If I see the location as a physical room and not a zoom link, I accept/tentative and add a comment that I won’t be at the office on that day/time and if we can do it online instead.
Yeah, I only mark a meeting room if I’ll be in that meeting room, and I’ll only do that on the 2x/week when we’re expected to be in the office.
Sounds like all the meetings should just be done by video and nothing would be lost.
My co-workers are also rarely in the office, so it makes no difference. ;)
Maybe head honchos don’t go into the office all the time and aren’t aware if the lower managers are working from home potentially
Boy I hate MS, and I hate Outlook, and MS Teams, and offices, and companies, and work…
Yet, I’m failing to understand what I’m supposed to be angry about here, can someone help?
From what I understand, you set the work hours and people will know if you’re working or not based on that…? It doesn’t sound too controversial to me.
Do people stay home without telling anyone and they wont be able to do that anymore? Or what?
I am in the middle of trying to get e911 functional for Teams direct route calls, based of lis data, my Teams can’t correctly determine the state I am in, much less my current address. It took multiple tickets to get our corporate headquarters to show up correctly instead of an address a half-mile away.
I forsee getting a lot of tickets from this feature.
Shit, wtf? Don’t you set the location yourself? Why don’t they just ask your city or something instead of trying to play smart?
You can set it yourself but it then verifies your address is real using Bing maps and the database is really lacking. If it doesn’t find an entry it won’t let you enter it. I am told this will be moving to Azure maps soon which I hope is better.
Anyway we are leveraging manual network entries tofind phones at our locations using the WAP bssid or, for ethernet, LLDP but the latter isn’t working. I can show LLDP coming in on a pcap but Teams doesn’t see it - another ticket for Microsoft.
It’s already started for me today. Teams now snitches on those who are remote and there’s no way to shut it off. My status is no longer just “Available”, it’s now “Available, Out of office”. Fuck Microsoft!
This is because you’ve accepted a meeting that happens at a location not in the building; for example, someone else’s PTO reminder that they’ve invited you to. Decline that invitation, and you’re fine.
soon “Available, Out of office, Single, Virgin, Allergic to milk”
Do you not have a work VPN?
I don’t get the problem. Isn’t this the entire point of registering your work location in outlook? Why would you add it and be surprised if others can see it?
The update will use the Work Hours and Location information stored within Outlook to offer up this information, meaning there may be some awkward conversations if your colleagues believe you to be in the office.
Microsoft 365 can help you manage and share your work schedule. New features allow you to specify more details about your work schedule: from where you’re working (remotely or in the office) and whether you work different hours on different days. In addition, you can schedule meetings with others based on their work location, view the work location on people’s profile card, and see your out of office time reflected in your location.
The upcoming update even allows you to not share your location (Again not sure why you wouldn’t share your location since that’s the entire point of adding your location but whatever): https://windowsreport.com/outlooks-work-hours-and-location-statuses-will-become-optional/
Am I completely crazy or is the article from tech radar complete bullshit?
Outlook will soon know if you’re properly dressed for work while you’re WFH in case you’re not. They will detect pink pixels on your camera. They will detect gurgling noises, thuds, clapping noises, spitting, long wave vibrations such as fun chair bouncing and short wave vibrations such as clipping your hair sounds. The future is worthless! I mean endless!
Soon Microsoft full body detection (including feet)
“Those loafers sure don’t look like heels Jenny! I expect you to be in your office attire at all times during work hours.”
Complete nothing burger
And your VPN connection to work knows your endpoint…
Interestingly, there’s another way of finding out if your coworker is in the office — just walk over to their desk.
Look. You are incapable of doing work anywhere but the office. Your collaborations severely lack. Somehow tho, when the executive class spends 10 hours in email it’s innovation. When you do it, you’re unproductive.
Interesting. Teams has been doing this for a few years now, so I assume it’s the same functionality just transferred over to Outlook (which has been going through a massive overhaul recently). For anyone in an MS-based company with Teams being actively used, this is not a new thing.
How does Teams give away your location? I’ve used it extensively, but I’ve never seen someone’s location unless the enter it manually.
It can be turned on by the IT dept in a large office. It has a different icon for in office network connection vs not. Not every IT dept uses it. Some treat other employees like adults, for instance.
Having my status turn yellow when I so much as look away from my screen is bad enough. I really hope this “feature” stays off.
It should be noted that work location is a self report tool designed to make collaboration easier so colleagues can know where you are and potentially align their work from home schedules with yours.
It isn’t a spy tool that tracks where you are. It’s basically just an optional tag that you can add to your calendar if you want.
We use a slack app for the same purpose, and it works great.
It’s not just a self reporting feature it seems. Our IT accidentally turned it on (as I understand) for a day by adding building info to one of the supervisors account. It then showed if you were in the same location (building) than your supervisor.
Do you mean it used the information from AD/Entra or was it tracking you?
I do not know if the setting is an Entra setting, I don’t have access. I’m just friendly with IT. This is what I believe they were talking about given their description. But not tracking, no. It’s basically a here/not here situation. You’re either tethered to local networking or not.
Do VPNs make that feature kind of pointless? We can’t access most things from home without going through a VPN. Every where I’ve worked (and gone to school) was like that.
At a lower level your IT dept logs the IP address you’re accessing m365 resources from.
Yes the security logs absolutely log that, but I haven’t heard of HR forcing IT to actually use those logs for discovering where people work.
We don’t give a shit and have better things to do.
OK, easy solution: don’t open outlook.
Most of the time that I’m in the office, my laptop is closed anyways, you know, for collaboration.
Your M365 admin can already tell by your IP address. Just like they know when you’re looking at porn when your IP randomly hops states for a little while.
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