If you need software to figure out if somebody is in the office, then it isn’t important for them to be in the office.

The supposed benefit of being in the office is because teams work better in person. If everybody else is at the office, it’s obvious who isn’t there.

MS tries to do way too much with M365 Teams. Why is this application concerned at all about the details of my WiFi connection? What if I’m wired? Tattle then?

Teams has it’s own bug-addled system-independent audio settings too, and it completely broke compatibility with my Bluetooth headset device some years ago. Took forever to diagnose. MS can’t help but layer complexity on needless complexity in Teams while allowing this bloatware to continue to harbor extremely obvious and annoying bugs.

> When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.

Great. Now the secure VM I use will always appear remote, when I'm in the office.

?

I’m not sure who would really care about this feature.

We can usually tell based on your background. And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes. And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?

Every recent employer I've had uses a VPN to get into their internal network when you're not logged into wifi or ethernet from inside a building, so I don't see this Teams change as a big deal. Must be something for small employers without much, if any, IT infrastructure or IT dept.

> Well, the main thing this brings to mind is an Amazon tactic that emerged after the pandemic. There was a big move to get people back to working in the office, and Amazon staffers who weren't happy with that could change their SSID (home Wi-Fi name) to match the company’s official office network.

> Now, do not take this as advice to do the same! It’s highly likely that a more advanced application like Teams has a more advanced check going on here, such as making sure your device has an IP address that matches the corporate office network, or checking the MAC address of the router.

Is there any reason you can't spoof literally all of that?

But if your boss really wants to know if you're in the office or not, they can track badge-swipes. That's what my employer does to enforce RTO compliance.

I thought the "work location" feature, where you set your work location to "office" or "remote", was pretty OK for letting people know if you are in the office. People do a similar thing with slack so you don't waste time trying to find someone in the office if they are working remotely.

(Am I the only person with wired ethernet on my desk(s)? I gave up on wi-fi during the pandemic due to terrible Zoom performance, and have kept wired ever since - lower latency, lower jitter, no interference, and faster overall.)

Maybe the new bit for Teams is aggregation and tracking. That probably isn't going to have any good effects.

I get the optics issue, but companies that want to track this stuff have long had ways to do it. Simple badge taps on doors for example. For example, Amazon has automated reporting that monitors badging in and out of the office so they track what days you’re in and how long you’re in to make sure resources adhere to the RTO5 mandate. HR is alerted in someone doesn’t have enough time badged in.

The physical access tags already do that

And don't think it'll be long till teams has built in jiggler detection too

Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work.

That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.

I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.

A clever person can use Elixir and Nerves on a carefully hidden Raspberry Pi to circumvent this.

This seems redundant with all of the other corporate spyware. My work laptop already is loaded to the gills with software that tracks my usage. At minimum, the VPN already knows when I am natively on the work network so it can be bypassed.

I think the only rational response (well, below "decline to play", don't work for assholes) is just arrange for it to be constantly snitching. Be that pizza shop with the worst yelp reviews.

As if I needed more reasons to hate this application more.

Dumb question... What if I rename my home wireless network to match the office wireless network name ?

One thing I know about Teams is it shows me as not active almost 100% of the time. I have to refresh the page in order to get the green "hey look, I'm working!" icon. On one hand, I don't care...on the other, it's annoying. So I basically never trust that location / status info.

Maybe this is a setup issue within our org, I don't know.

Flagging this, clickbaity articles shouldn't be here. The author is speculating, which they admit, and there is nothing about snitching to bosses. You can do better than this please.

Most EDRs/XDRs already provide this kind of visibility, and most employers have required these installed on employee laptops already.

Reality is, Corp IT has visibility on who is or isn't in the office already, so hyperventilating about Teams adding this capability is moot.

Sounds like a useful feature tbh. I wouldn't ever work for a company again that didn't have fully flexible working (no requirements to come into the office at all if you don't want). But I also wouldn't lie to my boss about it.

I guess you can always use the web version via a VPN or something. I doubt it can deal with that.

> 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.

I always despised Teams because it was a shitty chat app.

But now I despise it on an ideological level. So much so that I'm tempted to add something along the lines of "Do not invite me for interviews if your company (or your client's company, if you're a recruiter) uses Microsoft Teams for chat" to my LinkedIn profile.

Shadow IT is about to make a major comeback.

Nothing a little rpi nano running some lightweight VPN and some clever glue code couldn't fix. It isn't terribly difficult to slip into an IDF unnoticed and your IT department is probably disgruntled enough you could work them for a few months and get them to look the other way, anyway.

Really though this is all very exhausting. The media, controlled exclusively by corporate interests, has come up with all kinds of terms to disparage people. Just doing your job and getting by is "quiet quitting", etc. For those that didn't RTO you are probably getting railroaded.

I despise what I read here from pro-RTO posters because they miss the point. The great propaganda dispensed to us that "being the office was necessary" was proven wrong, without loss of generality, during COVID for nearly every cube farm job. It surprised no one when billions of dollars were spent buying news coverage about how RTO "harmed collaboration" and all kinds of other things. If going back to the office is such an amazing productivity boost why do you need nanny software? The answer is simple and we all have known it. It's only about control. We know that majority of capital for VCs comes from extortion level rates for multi-year leases of office buildings. VCs, too, are frauds. All of them. VCs control the C and Vs, C and Vs control the tax cattle.

It's bullshit of the highest order. All corporate work is just a pyramid scheme in different clothes. The sociopaths who run companies (of which I believe anyone who makes it to V or C level displays two or more sociopathic traits) do not like it when their reality distortion field falls apart.

Pure ragebait, location awareness existed pre-Teams in Lync/Skype/whatever.

Sounds like this was written by someone who thinks they're being sneaky by fucking off at work. They already know. Badge swipes and 1000 other ways.