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Watch out, Microsoft Outlook could soon give away when you're sneakily working from home (www.techradar.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It very clearly says it'll be using your work hours and location information. MS is turning your hardware into a GPS tracker for your company.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago

Except since there’s no actual GPS tracker, it uses your IP address. Microsoft thinks I live in either Virginia or North Dakota or Florida, depending on which part of the company’s VPN I connect to.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

MS is turning your hardware into a GPS tracker for your company.

I hate to break it to you but they are logging your location every time you log into their hardware... if you are using your own hardware, stop being an idiot and make your daddy buy you equipment required to do your job for him.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

pssh I wish I could use my own hardware. even if you get a great machine at first they never upgrade. do it like phones where you get an allowance if you use your own for work. I'd dual boot and always have top of the line

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if hey pay you allowance, that's fine from economic perspective. i would still be a bit concerned from privacy side tho of sharing work and private device for anything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I would never allow non-corp equipment to connect to our network.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.