This feature has been around for a while, at least the last year in our tenant as a voluntary feature and I genuinely like it to know if someone is in the office to help with something only according our on site systems or teleworking. Now we are unique since we have an air gapped system we need to maintain in addition to our internet connected system so there’s a real benefit to knowing if someone is around to work on an on-site issue.
If the concern though is that your employer is tracking you then the issue isn’t that Teams supports a location feature, it’s that you work for a shitty employer that doesn’t trust you and give you agency to do your best work. No feature in a productivity suite is going to change that, and it’s likely they are tracking work location anyways through things like VPN logs. This doesn’t change that.
it’s likely they are tracking work location anyways through things like VPN logs. This doesn’t change that.
Louder for the people in the back. Any workplace that cares about in or out of the office for micromanaging purposes was already getting that info from other sources.
Also, while I haven’t looked hard for it, I haven’t seen anything floating around the PowerShell, Azure, or Microsoft 365/Graph communities on how to pull this location info from the back end for any sort of serious usage in tracking employees. As far as I can tell this is almost entirely just something shown in the UI.
I don’t think anyone doubted that company IT could theoretically do this already.
The real threat people see is from self-important busybody middle managers who actually look at peoples’ status who would now have this information front and center.Again though the issue isn’t this feature, it’s that those are shitty managers and the solution is to deal with that, not complain about how a feature could be misused. Most features of most tools could be used in malicious ways but we keep them because they also provide value. Crappy managers have a thousand ways to try and track “productivity” and use those tools against you. Email counts, calendar availability, pull request metrics, etc.
Wouldn’t it be sufficient to just make a status “available on site” and not track the actual position?
The current version is just in office and home, this announcement extends it to allow for specific on-site spaces/buildings which for large campuses is advantageous. I haven’t seen anything that says it will directly track and report your location Outside of the generic ones that an admin configures like the “Studio B” example in the article. It uses pretty benign signals to boot: a corporate WiFi connection, a specific peripheral like a monitor, or wake from sleep (which Teams already does for normal presence and presumably to note the absence of other location signals). Microsoft says it won’t track specific desks, offices, or floors but I’m guessing if an admin wanted to put the effort in that could be setup within the limits of how many locations are available to configure.
