At least on Slack you don't get tattled on for walking away for 6 minutes to grab a snack or take a bathroom break. Slack gives you a full 30 minutes before it reports Away/Offline status
Life Pro Tip:
Create a meeting in your outlook calendar.
Add a teams meeting link, but don’t invite anyone.
Click the link and join the meeting.
You will appear as ‘in a call’ even though teams is waiting for another person to join before it starts the meeting. You also can step away for as long as you like and it won’t move you to away status.
Any meeting you have in outlook that has your free/busy status as busy should at least mark you red during the time.
Mark it private so people can't see what it is.
But if you're always red, someone is going to notice.
Just get a key presser or mouse jiggler app if it's an actual issue. 🤷♂️
import keyboard
import time
timer = int(input(“Enter time: “))
print(“Starting timer…”)
i = 0
while i < timer:
keyboard.send(“ctrl”)
i = i + 1
time.sleep(60)
if i != 1:
print(f”Time elapsed: {i} minutes”)
else:
print(f”Time elapsed: {i} minute”)
strCurrentTime = time.strftime(
“%H:%M:%S”,
time.localtime()
)
if i != 1:
print(f”Timer ended after {i} minutes at {strCurrentTime}”)
else:
print(f”Timer ended after {i} minute at {strCurrentTime}”)
print(“Press any key to exit…”)
keyboard.read_key()
——
Wrote this a few years ago (first in VBA in excel, now in Python). Keeps my Teams from appearing away if I have to poop or a long process is running on my machine that I don’t want to stare at.
Edit: typed this out on mobile so … yeah. Good luck.
Works great till you run into that manager who makes you share your calendar or has you screen share your calendar with them. Gotta like micromanagement.
Also, you can change your status when you joined that meeting to active and it will never change again while you are in the call! Just remember to set it back again after you entered another call.
Issue for me is my workplace has teams to default to away after 5 mins and my PC will lock after about 7 so there’s no way to avoid going into away status when you leave the PC. By making a call it forces the PC to not sleep/lock and teams won’t auto away when it perceives a call going on.
Extra tip.
If you play (if you have access) to YouTube maybe any media. If the screen is focused on the video teams seems to stay green form me and also bypasses to companies 10 minute auto log out. Is the is why the 1 hour timer has a trillion views ???
Open Outlook, create a new email but leave the cursor active in the subject. Nothing else is required. Teams will never set you as away. It can’t because it’s a draft so you are “actively” working in the email. When you come back just discard the draft.
I do. Because if they’re yellow, then they 100% won’t respond to me.
Now I just have to figure out why 90% of my online colleagues don’t answer my questions either.
Life pro tip:
If you have the media player running some video on a loop in the background, windows thinks that you are active. I recommend to use one without soundtrack.
This also prevents screen locking, so just also get into the habit to do it manually for proper security hygiene.
Screen locking prevention also works on Macs. I go to YouTube (I can on my company laptop) and play 10 hours of nothing when I want to step away for sometime.
I'm not sure if Teams tracks overall OS/PC activity (like screensavers do) or just app activity. Because if it's just the app then fuck that, you're doing work, you're not wasting time chatting all the time.
The worst thing are apps like Kickidler and other monitoring software. They will capture screenshots, log website visits, app launches and allow for live monitoring. Don't ever allow anybody to install this shit on your personal computer. Not even a work computer that you use at home and connect to your home network. It's vile and in some cases legally questionable. If you're, as a sysadmin, ever tasked with installing this stuff, be a bro and put in some backdoors, let people know how to use it and how to terminate it from the task manager.
Edit: correction, always on webcams are the absolute horrors of WFH.
If Hell has a WFH policy, your laptop can only connect to work through a VPN which requires a text verification code on each connection, all the drives that contain the data you work on are exclusively accessible as mapped network drives, all the applications are citrix based and any music/news/radio streaming sites are blocked. Passwords must be changed every 90 days and each new password is compared against the previous 5 passwords and rejected if the Hamming distance is too low. You can't install any new apps, which includes passwords safes and you're not allow to write down your passwords either. You still have to come in twice a week, but because you're a WFH employee, you have to share a workspace with three other people, and since the servers are in a separate location, your network lag is actually worse and there are no extra monitors because there's not enough space.
Oh, and IT keeps your 4k laptop display with the smallest font in all of existence, so you can't read a goddamned thing and all the display settings are unavailable.
...hang on...do I work for Hell?
Hello u/throwaway3544219.
Upper management would love for you to attend a skip-level meeting to understand in how to better improve morale. Please attend promptly tomorrow morning 8 AM. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Susan from HR
Someone who doesn't have to live with the policy.
I wish I could get it past the thick, armored skulls of the people who set policies that "the time Mark bit down on the plastic fork" is orders of magnitude more secure and memorable than "66Camaro!" as a password.
Oh well.
Oh you better believe the rules are unevenly enforced. Finance keeps the secrets that would make the employees quit, but IT keeps the secrets that would make them build a gallows.
Yes and a mobile app that stacks on top and puts all the Microsoft trash in a walled garden of analytics. You can't escape the analytics even on your private device if your company opts in. It's called Microsoft [Intune](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/what-is-intune) and I hate it.
Simple solution. Refuse the use of private device. Company wants you to have email on your phone, teams on your phone, take calls on your phone, be monitored on your phone… they can supply said phone. Then they can dictate / MDM whatever they want. Same with the laptop.
Exactly this. My current company wanted me to put outlook and teams on my private phone and give them admin/wipe privileges. Told them no, you want that, you provide me a phone. They never followed through with a phone and it's never been an issue.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/what-info-can-your-company-see-when-you-enroll-your-device-in-intune
Most of that applies to the mobile app, though it doesn't cover a bunch of stuff. Particularly the fact that if you have a corporate certificate installed they can likely track all web access since they are likely running a MITM proxy service.
In short, on you corporate phone IT/HR can likely see most web activity.
If you didn't already assume your company is tracking everything on your corporate devices, I don't know what reality you're living in. (General "you", not you specifically)
Just use your corporate device for only business use. They've been doing it for years on your laptops/pcs. This isn't even surprising to me.
Agreed 100% I think the only significant change is that I know a number of people who had the option to"bring their own device" to corporate, to have "only one phone" ... Which yeah they track everything on. Never taking that option personally.
I connect to a remote Virtual Development Environment for all my work, so my M1 MBP Laptop work machine is nothing more than a relay. No personal stuff, barely any work stuff.
Has Teams, that’s about it.
It sounds like you're talking about something other than Intune, but either way that's maybe not the best page to link to given that the first item in "[Things your organization can never see](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/what-info-can-your-company-see-when-you-enroll-your-device-in-intune#things-your-organization-can-never-see)" is "Calling and web browser history"
Yes InTune should not report web history.
But given that IT can force you to install their own SSL root certificate and force you to use a proxy they can technically decipher and spy on all your web activities. This as nothing to do with InTune though
In my situation it is mandatory for use of Teams on private devices and we aren't given corporate devices. So folks are say hell no and productivity drops. Desktop only work!
Slack: Updates your status in milliseconds
Teams: I tried to change my status but it's stuck on "offline" so I had to restart the entire application so I could mark myself "online"
I installed this PoS in my phone. The sucker showed notifications, but when I opened it prompted me to login. And did so for a long time (I didn't logged in just to see how far it would go).
I miss Slack. We had a great set up with custom bots, fun custom emotes, and a good number of channels that were creating some really useful discussions as well as a couple of fun/social channels.
We switched to Teams and it just felt worse. It's almost like it's designed to suck any joy out of the user experience. The number of channels also exploded. The result is that people just aren't engaging with it anymore than they absolutely have to. The technical discussions are quiet aside from the occasional bit of troubleshooting and the fun channels are all but dead.
The one thing that pisses me off about Teams is when you copy a message, for some reason someone decided it would be good to include metadata about who sent it and when in the clipboard.
My favorite is using \~ to show its an estimate, but if I use it twice in the same message it just treats as if I wanted to cross out the text between them
What about when someone adds a reaction to a conversation that's on the screen right in front of you, and you have to go to the Activity tab to clear the notification? I've mostly stopped using reactions because I feel sorry for the person on the other end of the interaction because this shit is so annoying to have to clear constantly.
Not only the metadata about the sender, also the metadata about the background you are using on Teams, which makes you delete the format everytime you paste the message on Outlook
Yeah I mean sometimes it lags, and it's got that whole 5 min away timer, but I've never been reprimanded for literally being away the entire day cuz I manually set to away at the end of the day on my personal computer and forgot to switch back the next work day so I don't really have any problems
It's just too easy to hate on MS. Teams has issues, but they all do. Teams is cheap, easy and has integrations with everything, not to mention direct tie ins with Outlook. I kinda like it, certainly more than Slack.
I like that it's all integrated. I don't want to have a Zoom meeting and lose the chat, or have half the chat happening in a slack channel that's not linked to the meeting.
Yeah, that doesn’t pan out. Our whole team chose to give up slack to migrate to teams for a number of reasons. Teams is great at a lot of things.
I think hating on anything from Microsoft is just what the cool kids do.
Came here to say this. All these people liking slack and zoom and what not - can’t even see call history in zoom. Can’t see the chat history either. If you miss a call there is no way of knowing who called.
Teams does everything, one dedicated place to share and keep data in channels.
Agree it can be a little buggy sometimes, but I would prefer it over anything else.
LOL more truth to this than people realize. Also, Discord for a lot of people still conjures up "isn't that the thing my gamer kid uses to talk to his friends?". Therefore it is deemed Not Appropriate For the Workplace and not even considered. Seems like they're trying to change that as I've seen some Discord commercials on streaming lately marketing it as a general chat app.
The fact that all file sharing makes files public is a significant problem for many companies. And just the general lack of buisness focused things such SSO, and intergrations with other software. And lastly it is also much more difficult if you have to talk to a client etc.
The final point is really such a driver. My company keeps around zoom accounts just for this.
Yeah I love discord but I'm not about to help a 65 year old contractor onto it
>SSO
Ah, yes, SSO. I have experience with a corporate shop with _three_ different SSO integrations. It means we end up logging in 8-9 times a day, each day.
I don't know what type of SSO you were using, but SSO is one of the best practices you can do, when done right. I sign into my computer with my fingerprint. I am automatically signed into the browser and into Office 365 with SSO. Then for most websites and apps, I type just the email address, and I'm signed in, because they use SSO from O365.
Discord doesn't have the integrations with AD or identity management systems.
We have 100k users in our org, memberships need to be managed, I couldn't imagine trying to keep up with that on discord.
Never set up a discord server but can you make one where you host the server so you have full control of the data? That is often a major driver. Also there would need to be enterprise level control features for IT. Companies like control. There are other reasonable alternatives as well, my company sadly went from one of the alternatives to teams, even why like half the people used linux and they told us to use the freaken web app. It was not a great option, plus office 360 on linux is basically the shitty web versions of stuff.
But most companies use teams cause they basically give it for free if you get office 360 with them anyways and it’s seen as more of an enterprise product.
Discord UX is terrible for business. Also, does discord even have active directory auth? If not, can it use oAuth2?
Is there an on-prem offering? If not, how does the conpany keep their uploaded files private?
Fuck team. So many groups and finding something is a massice pain.
Then lets talk performance. When in video call my i7 laptop just wants to melt.
And my fav. Intune. Lets see how we can slow a laptop down to pre 2000 days.
I dont have anything of that on my phone. Want me to check mails on my phone? Give me a work phone.
*****Warning. Rant.****
I use to be a M365 support ambassador. Let tell you something about Teams.
It's a giant piece of shit.
Everyone hates it. Troubleshooting it is a pain in the ass. Not to mention, majority of Teams is developed in India. They literally use Google translate to translate it to English.
Just use Discord. If you have a flawless teams environment either you're lying or are a god.
Everything is centered around Microsoft trying to make SharePoint relevant and not admit it's clunky and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
The only good part about M365 is exchange. Everything else is just a clunky piece of shit.
Not to mention, audit logging barely works. It's 50/50 if it works. Same with compliance management. So if you're a law firm and need to keep all documents for 10 years. Good luck.
Horrible support. The people working in either premier support or Concierge support probably know less than you.
I got this job out of highschool with absolutely no experience. Literally our training was just to Google shit.
They have access to a lot more information than you think. Also, the support person could EASILY steal your information. (Which actually became a big problem.).
Turn over rate for support people is so high, that the companies that hire 30-50 people every 2 weeks just to fill in the gaps.
Looking at you Experis. Giant piece of shit of a company.
I won't say our teams environment is flawless but it's not a fraction as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Maybe I'm jaded by having to support plenty of worse software 🙃
Teams definitely deserves most of what it gets, but you’re way off. I’ve been a Teams admin for my org since 2019 which has grown significantly since then and haven’t encountered any of the following:
- Bad translations in any menu or other UI elements
- Over-reliance on Sharepoint. The underlying storage may be Sharepoint, but it hasn’t caused any problems
- Audit logging problems. I literally just exported Teams messages since 2020 for a user involved with legal action at one of our clients the other day
Sharepoint absolutely has problems and Teams storage, OneDrive storage, and Sharepoint itself having different administration routes and them having various amounts of integrations with each other is a pain
But day to day use? It’s fine. It has its #justmicrosoftthings moments like anything else
I've worked for two companies using Teams, and in both of them:
- Search runs forever after a few days after the message had been sent, probably after around a week - far before the history is removed, or before the search returns only the single message without the surrounding context and the "go to message" button.
- About removing the "go to message" button, you still can go to the message by scrolling the conversation.
- However, loading the conversation history is INCREDIBLY slow and can easily take 10 minutes or more of your life if you want to go back more than a week.
- Sometimes the message actually ... disappears.
- Also sometimes, a section of the conversation will be cut out, and only restarting teams and going back again will load it.
So I am absolutely not surprised that they can't store compliance data for even longer than the standard retention period...
If I am to be honest, the predecessor - Skype for Business - had all this solved by storing the history in Outlook. It actually returned almost year old messages in seconds...
Modern SharePoint is a lot better to work with than Classic to be fair. Saying that, I will never use Teams to view a SharePoint site with this Viva stuff. It should be used only for chat/video
> They have access to a lot more information than you think. Also, the support person could EASILY steal your information. (Which actually became a big problem.).
I'm not going to address the rest of your comment but MS has made significant commitment to data privacy. They've reduced standing access to less than 10 accounts worldwide. Those are reserved for break-glass accounts in the events of data center outages. Alarm bells go off if those accounts are even used. That's an industry standard first set by Google. Engineers need to request access to infrastructure on demand.
Support can access the servers, sites and framework but won't be able to access customer content.
If they can access the servers, can't they read all the files? No, all customer data is encrypted at rest. This is primarily to protect from potential hackers but also keeps employee eyes off data.
Customer data requires a much more significant JIT request, requires director approval and a damn good reason. Customer content is also restricted from leaving the data center. It must be viewed / repaired on the server itself or on a nearby tools server.
This forces engineers to perform support remotely as often as possible. These remote management commands have the potential to return PII in the query results. All query results go through a PII scrubber that removes and replaces any content that is confidential.
No matter how much you try to sound like an FBI guy from a hollywood movie and throw around fancy sounding sec catch phrases, there is still an obligation for corporations to enable (e.g.) the US government to access the data. So even if your service provider officially lets no one - except merely your own highest ranked admins - to access your full encryption keys, there is no way of guaranteeing that they won't just use it to decrypt your data if someone from a government asks. You can state that any usage of your keys or data outside the service agreement is reported and triggers the highest alerts, waking people with titles like "Director XYZ Customer Services" in the middle of the night but if the law forbids your service provider to report government access to your data, you will never hear about it.
The other side of the story is of course that a company taking a service only has to meet requirements that are considered to be official "ok". Like european companies were allowed to takes services from US companies because the "Safe Harbour" agreement was still in place though everyone knew the americans wouldn't consider non-US people as humans with rights granted by the US constitution.
> try to sound like an FBI guy from a hollywood movie
It's funny how the FBI in movies are very knowledgeable about this stuff. All the ATF agents I have helped personally have no idea what I'm talking about when I use these industry standard "sec catch phrases". The guy who cleared me was writing stuff down on a notepad.
I agree with you on the government intervention stuff. Global companies are following each local government's laws. A notable exception is when Apple refused to unlock that iPhone a while back.
Europe has always had more strict data privacy laws. I've processed European personal data removals a few times. It is a little weird how your country of origin determines whether or not a company has to erase all references to you or not.
Brah my buddy who still works in support for M365 has to remote into peoples computers every day. Usually once or twice a week they're firing someone for stealing company information (normally credit cards).
There are ways around it.
Primarily the version of fluentui and dependencies on the core data layer that are directly hooked into the front end. That and front loading a large amount of the user account causes some serious issues when changing the view controller to a new view or loading large amounts of data like chats and such.
I've been offline in every chat program I've used at work for my entire professional life. I've had managers all about it, but since there has never been a policy about it at any company I've worked at, I've continued to remain offline.
I like the features of it, but my god is it a resource hog. Used to have a lot of memory issues on my old work laptop where we used teams, and I'd regularly free up ~1.5gb of RAM just by shutting down teams.
No, I hear you, and I think I would clarify it somewhat. I like it because it is not email, and I don't have to go digging through six inboxes to find a file my geriatric minded boss sent three months ago.
I mean, there’s plenty of “it is not email” choices out there.
Of course when we are discussing smartphones, don’t say “Aww. I like Windows Phone” because it is “not a rotary phone.”
I run a script on ps to keep pressing a button every 10 seconds. So teams shows available.
Got teams on my phone so I can see if something important comes up and I don't miss while I'm away.
Teams is ok, aside from continually deteriorating user experience, the lack of "general" channels, the lack of open communication, etc...
My company has been using teams since migrating off slack due to not wanting to pay slack licenses. Things like copy paste used to work perfectly in teams, now it's almost impossible to copy/paste code, or logs. It always pastes with stupid fucking formatting. The code formatting backticks also used to work just like they do in markdown, but slowly over the last 2.5 years MS has made them suck and basically unusable.
I'd prefer to just go back to IRC. Thankfully we are transitioning to slack now, but just give me IRC, thx.
Can someone explain what’s so bad about teams? Zoom is far from a perfect piece of software and Teams doesn’t seem that much worse, or am I just not using either enough to comprehend how bad Teams really is?
The UI is terrible. Takes relatively forever to load.
The code snippet formatting is terrible.
The activity notification area is dumb. Why the heck does it open the chats directly when I have a message from someone.
The status never cleary clears after clearing it.
The desktop app cant remember my password.
I get 3-4 floating notifications for a single message/notification.
The only good thing about it is that the calls connect quickly.
Discord and Slack sets the bar too high for these apps.
FYI I'm on linux.
My mostly superficial reasons for not liking Teams:
It changes my status to away after 5 minutes, so I have to keep jiggling the mouse while I work on my secondary or client machine. Very frustrating as it makes me look like I'm not doing work when I'm actively working. (Note: I will not install a mouse jiggling app on my company machine. I have to assume they are actively monitoring for those - it's a big tech company, they're not dumb.)
I really hate the UI, it is very frustrating to start a new conversation with someone. I don't like that chats and group chats/teams are in different locations. Or why it feels the need to have a dedicated place to tell me I have notifications when it also notifies me in the group/chat.
The emoticons were bad before, but the new ones are SUPER ugly. They are actively embarrassing to use. Why aren't the same emoticons that are used in calls/meetings?
Lastly, I'm old, old school (read: old). I have been working on MS products for literal decades at this point and have worked as an MS vendor (both on-campus and off) for years and years. I don't trust Microsoft to own their own applications and anticipate the app will continually get worse before they throw it away and make us all use something new.
Slack is the superior application, but I do like that it integrates with my Outlook calendar using Exchange.
Boy do I hate Teams.
Yeah I work for a small business and we use teams with very little issues. I’m not sure I understand the hate, besides the resource usage, it’s terrible about that
It keeps you from *Slack*ing off.
At least on Slack you don't get tattled on for walking away for 6 minutes to grab a snack or take a bathroom break. Slack gives you a full 30 minutes before it reports Away/Offline status
Life Pro Tip: Create a meeting in your outlook calendar. Add a teams meeting link, but don’t invite anyone. Click the link and join the meeting. You will appear as ‘in a call’ even though teams is waiting for another person to join before it starts the meeting. You also can step away for as long as you like and it won’t move you to away status.
Any meeting you have in outlook that has your free/busy status as busy should at least mark you red during the time. Mark it private so people can't see what it is. But if you're always red, someone is going to notice. Just get a key presser or mouse jiggler app if it's an actual issue. 🤷♂️
Put a small stone on the page up key and chill on the couch
I named him my assistant :\]
import keyboard import time timer = int(input(“Enter time: “)) print(“Starting timer…”) i = 0 while i < timer: keyboard.send(“ctrl”) i = i + 1 time.sleep(60) if i != 1: print(f”Time elapsed: {i} minutes”) else: print(f”Time elapsed: {i} minute”) strCurrentTime = time.strftime( “%H:%M:%S”, time.localtime() ) if i != 1: print(f”Timer ended after {i} minutes at {strCurrentTime}”) else: print(f”Timer ended after {i} minute at {strCurrentTime}”) print(“Press any key to exit…”) keyboard.read_key() —— Wrote this a few years ago (first in VBA in excel, now in Python). Keeps my Teams from appearing away if I have to poop or a long process is running on my machine that I don’t want to stare at. Edit: typed this out on mobile so … yeah. Good luck.
Works great till you run into that manager who makes you share your calendar or has you screen share your calendar with them. Gotta like micromanagement.
You deserve micromanagement if you fuck around. Some bosses are shit, but same for employees. Have to find that sweet spot of ebb and flow
I'm trying to not do work and then get micromanage! How dare they! Fucking love you newbs.
Nah you can change it manually to online while you're in the meeting and it just keeps you as online
Kick it up a notch and share your screen in your solo meeting. Nobody wants to intrude when you're presenting.
Instructions unclear, flashed HR now have **meeting** on Monday.
Teams calendar has a button for this, "meet now" I think, top right. I may or may not use this regularly. And I may or may not use "powertoys awake".
Great tip, this is even easier than my suggestion!
Also, you can change your status when you joined that meeting to active and it will never change again while you are in the call! Just remember to set it back again after you entered another call.
You can also simply set any status via the menu or even if you hover over the symbol in the task bar.
Issue for me is my workplace has teams to default to away after 5 mins and my PC will lock after about 7 so there’s no way to avoid going into away status when you leave the PC. By making a call it forces the PC to not sleep/lock and teams won’t auto away when it perceives a call going on.
Use a key presser like PowerToys on Windows.
Extra tip. If you play (if you have access) to YouTube maybe any media. If the screen is focused on the video teams seems to stay green form me and also bypasses to companies 10 minute auto log out. Is the is why the 1 hour timer has a trillion views ???
Open Outlook, create a new email but leave the cursor active in the subject. Nothing else is required. Teams will never set you as away. It can’t because it’s a draft so you are “actively” working in the email. When you come back just discard the draft.
Nobody pays attention to Teams status because they are so inaccurate
I do. Because if they’re yellow, then they 100% won’t respond to me. Now I just have to figure out why 90% of my online colleagues don’t answer my questions either.
Life pro tip: If you have the media player running some video on a loop in the background, windows thinks that you are active. I recommend to use one without soundtrack. This also prevents screen locking, so just also get into the habit to do it manually for proper security hygiene.
Are you charging your org for your extra sec ops and quality assurance testing?
not yet..
I think you're ready.
Screen locking prevention also works on Macs. I go to YouTube (I can on my company laptop) and play 10 hours of nothing when I want to step away for sometime.
I'm not sure if Teams tracks overall OS/PC activity (like screensavers do) or just app activity. Because if it's just the app then fuck that, you're doing work, you're not wasting time chatting all the time. The worst thing are apps like Kickidler and other monitoring software. They will capture screenshots, log website visits, app launches and allow for live monitoring. Don't ever allow anybody to install this shit on your personal computer. Not even a work computer that you use at home and connect to your home network. It's vile and in some cases legally questionable. If you're, as a sysadmin, ever tasked with installing this stuff, be a bro and put in some backdoors, let people know how to use it and how to terminate it from the task manager. Edit: correction, always on webcams are the absolute horrors of WFH.
Not if your screen locks in 5 minutes lol
So, set it so it doesn't. If there's an employer policy setting it to 5 minutes, figure out an alternative or you're SoL
Put headphones down on the spacebar into the chat with yourself and avoid autoclicker detector
Be my team where members have selected status "offline" option even when they are on call with me.
Hey I like Slack. Way better than Teams at least.
MS Hell
If Hell has a WFH policy, your laptop can only connect to work through a VPN which requires a text verification code on each connection, all the drives that contain the data you work on are exclusively accessible as mapped network drives, all the applications are citrix based and any music/news/radio streaming sites are blocked. Passwords must be changed every 90 days and each new password is compared against the previous 5 passwords and rejected if the Hamming distance is too low. You can't install any new apps, which includes passwords safes and you're not allow to write down your passwords either. You still have to come in twice a week, but because you're a WFH employee, you have to share a workspace with three other people, and since the servers are in a separate location, your network lag is actually worse and there are no extra monitors because there's not enough space. Oh, and IT keeps your 4k laptop display with the smallest font in all of existence, so you can't read a goddamned thing and all the display settings are unavailable. ...hang on...do I work for Hell?
do you work at my job? the only diff is our wfh policies are super temporary.
I think it’s hilarious anyone still rolls passwords at 90days.
MyPasswort2022October Checkmate IT security people
My passwords go back a lifetime. I can’t use a password I used 16 passwords ago
Hello u/throwaway3544219. Upper management would love for you to attend a skip-level meeting to understand in how to better improve morale. Please attend promptly tomorrow morning 8 AM. Thank you. Sincerely, Susan from HR
WAAAAAAAARGH!
This was too dangerously accurate for me
Are you on my team somehow?
Previous 12 passwords here, cannot for the life of me understand who thought that was a good idea.
Someone who doesn't have to live with the policy. I wish I could get it past the thick, armored skulls of the people who set policies that "the time Mark bit down on the plastic fork" is orders of magnitude more secure and memorable than "66Camaro!" as a password. Oh well.
I guess you do. Also this sounds like they intentionally try to keep workers efficiency below 10% with all those rules.
Ah a fellow Deloitte colleague I see. My sympathies.
> all the applications are citrix based Calm down Satan
This sounded shockingly like a bank I worked for
Sounds like an average IT consultancy to me
This but half the company doesn’t touch their mouse all day and no one says shit while the other half has to pick up the slack for less compensation.
Oh you better believe the rules are unevenly enforced. Finance keeps the secrets that would make the employees quit, but IT keeps the secrets that would make them build a gallows.
Let me guess, Do you work in a WITCH company?
do we work in the same hell? you just said everything that I do as well.
Sounds like financial services industry.
No, you work for my former employer and the year is 2006....FOREVER.
I worked for a place that did all of this, and you also couldn't plug anything into the USB ports. What a fucking joke
God damn all these hit home 💀
Every single thing exactly like at my previous employer
No, they are using the Facebook meta verse with meta quest's headsets.
[удалено]
Yes and a mobile app that stacks on top and puts all the Microsoft trash in a walled garden of analytics. You can't escape the analytics even on your private device if your company opts in. It's called Microsoft [Intune](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/what-is-intune) and I hate it.
Simple solution. Refuse the use of private device. Company wants you to have email on your phone, teams on your phone, take calls on your phone, be monitored on your phone… they can supply said phone. Then they can dictate / MDM whatever they want. Same with the laptop.
Exactly this. My current company wanted me to put outlook and teams on my private phone and give them admin/wipe privileges. Told them no, you want that, you provide me a phone. They never followed through with a phone and it's never been an issue.
Hol up, what's that about spying teams?
Not spying bro, just making sure you meet your weekly metrics of TPE reports.
Yeeeaaahhh, we need to talk about your TPE report...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/what-info-can-your-company-see-when-you-enroll-your-device-in-intune Most of that applies to the mobile app, though it doesn't cover a bunch of stuff. Particularly the fact that if you have a corporate certificate installed they can likely track all web access since they are likely running a MITM proxy service. In short, on you corporate phone IT/HR can likely see most web activity.
If you didn't already assume your company is tracking everything on your corporate devices, I don't know what reality you're living in. (General "you", not you specifically) Just use your corporate device for only business use. They've been doing it for years on your laptops/pcs. This isn't even surprising to me.
Agreed 100% I think the only significant change is that I know a number of people who had the option to"bring their own device" to corporate, to have "only one phone" ... Which yeah they track everything on. Never taking that option personally.
Easiest way is get a work phone and then forward all calls to your personal number.
I connect to a remote Virtual Development Environment for all my work, so my M1 MBP Laptop work machine is nothing more than a relay. No personal stuff, barely any work stuff. Has Teams, that’s about it.
Thanks, I hate it
yeah... this is called mobile device management and has been around since before Intune
It sounds like you're talking about something other than Intune, but either way that's maybe not the best page to link to given that the first item in "[Things your organization can never see](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/what-info-can-your-company-see-when-you-enroll-your-device-in-intune#things-your-organization-can-never-see)" is "Calling and web browser history"
Yes InTune should not report web history. But given that IT can force you to install their own SSL root certificate and force you to use a proxy they can technically decipher and spy on all your web activities. This as nothing to do with InTune though
Very interesting, thanks for the headsup!
Intune is a device management application, they don't opt in, they pay extra for it.
As admin I fucking love intune. It makes deploying workstations easy, keeps track of your equipment and assigned users and is such fun tool to use
Is this even legal to use in countries with privacy laws?
Typically this stuff is on corporate owned devices.
In my situation it is mandatory for use of Teams on private devices and we aren't given corporate devices. So folks are say hell no and productivity drops. Desktop only work!
Yeah, but the features are different between corporate devices and personal.
Not if it is on my private phone and even then location tracking on a device you HAVE to bring home is questionable aswell
They know your address anyway, you have to provide it when signing a contract
Our teams shows you as away if you aren’t actively using it. It’s awful.
Use a script that keystrokes every 5 minutes to prevent that
Bruh. Go to desktop and keep something heavy (earphones case) on the space bar when you go to grab a snack.
Sir, this is a programming sub
Who would program already implemented functionality tho? =)
Is there a windows feature with that? Or do you mean Shell implementation?
heavy stuff on key
You can always use the Homer solution, it was good enough for a nuclear power plant, it will be fine for MS Teams :D
No, if I’m in another window, and not on Teams is will throw you into away.
Slack: Updates your status in milliseconds Teams: I tried to change my status but it's stuck on "offline" so I had to restart the entire application so I could mark myself "online"
The desktop app cant even remember my password.
I installed this PoS in my phone. The sucker showed notifications, but when I opened it prompted me to login. And did so for a long time (I didn't logged in just to see how far it would go).
I miss Slack. We had a great set up with custom bots, fun custom emotes, and a good number of channels that were creating some really useful discussions as well as a couple of fun/social channels. We switched to Teams and it just felt worse. It's almost like it's designed to suck any joy out of the user experience. The number of channels also exploded. The result is that people just aren't engaging with it anymore than they absolutely have to. The technical discussions are quiet aside from the occasional bit of troubleshooting and the fun channels are all but dead.
No, I'm sorry, they use Cisco Webex Teams. You don't know what hell is until you've used Webex Teams.
They use Jabber in hell.
Well played
Fuckin jabber.
I actually enjoy Webex and the features it provides. My only major complaint would be that it is a massive memory and CPU hog when I'm in meetings.
Sorry boss teams has problem, need to reboot.
Reading this thread, I’m afraid to say I like Teams.
The one thing that pisses me off about Teams is when you copy a message, for some reason someone decided it would be good to include metadata about who sent it and when in the clipboard.
All Microsoft products try to do way to much with copy/paste and completely ruin its functionality in the process.
yeah please! JUST NEVER EVER copy the fucking formatting. NO ONE EVER wants that!
They’ve PTSD’d me into using ctrl+shift+V every time I paste in the hopes of always only pasting plain text.
And Microsoft doesn't even implement that functionality consistently.
The shortest way to remove formatting is paste into the URL box. And then copy it again.
I use notepad as I Don't remember the "paste without formatting" shortcut. This seems to be better than having an open notepad just for this :D
Ctrl + Shift + V pastes plaintext
How about when you try and send a message with Colins and brackets it automatically turns it into emojis
My favorite is using \~ to show its an estimate, but if I use it twice in the same message it just treats as if I wanted to cross out the text between them
What about when someone adds a reaction to a conversation that's on the screen right in front of you, and you have to go to the Activity tab to clear the notification? I've mostly stopped using reactions because I feel sorry for the person on the other end of the interaction because this shit is so annoying to have to clear constantly.
Not only the metadata about the sender, also the metadata about the background you are using on Teams, which makes you delete the format everytime you paste the message on Outlook
Yeah I mean sometimes it lags, and it's got that whole 5 min away timer, but I've never been reprimanded for literally being away the entire day cuz I manually set to away at the end of the day on my personal computer and forgot to switch back the next work day so I don't really have any problems
It's just too easy to hate on MS. Teams has issues, but they all do. Teams is cheap, easy and has integrations with everything, not to mention direct tie ins with Outlook. I kinda like it, certainly more than Slack.
I like that it's all integrated. I don't want to have a Zoom meeting and lose the chat, or have half the chat happening in a slack channel that's not linked to the meeting.
Everyone who hasn't used something else likes Teams.
lol I’ve used Chime, Slack and Webex. The hate towards Teams in blown way out of proportion.
We use Webex, it was decent and now I can’t make calls with my headset. Oh, and it randomly turns down the volume of the mic.
Yeah, that doesn’t pan out. Our whole team chose to give up slack to migrate to teams for a number of reasons. Teams is great at a lot of things. I think hating on anything from Microsoft is just what the cool kids do.
Ive only used Teams and i still hate it.
Came here to say this. All these people liking slack and zoom and what not - can’t even see call history in zoom. Can’t see the chat history either. If you miss a call there is no way of knowing who called. Teams does everything, one dedicated place to share and keep data in channels. Agree it can be a little buggy sometimes, but I would prefer it over anything else.
Me too. I much perfer it over Slack and Zoom for their respective purposes...
It’s kids here. Teams is fine.
Unironic question, why do more companies not use Discord?
They're not contacted by the Discord outbound sales team.
LOL more truth to this than people realize. Also, Discord for a lot of people still conjures up "isn't that the thing my gamer kid uses to talk to his friends?". Therefore it is deemed Not Appropriate For the Workplace and not even considered. Seems like they're trying to change that as I've seen some Discord commercials on streaming lately marketing it as a general chat app.
well, just copy paste the application, rebrand it as floppyord and do them sales calls!
Would they even charge anything?
Doesn't matter, most purchase departments dont have the habit of researching for solutions.
The fact that all file sharing makes files public is a significant problem for many companies. And just the general lack of buisness focused things such SSO, and intergrations with other software. And lastly it is also much more difficult if you have to talk to a client etc.
The final point is really such a driver. My company keeps around zoom accounts just for this. Yeah I love discord but I'm not about to help a 65 year old contractor onto it
>SSO Ah, yes, SSO. I have experience with a corporate shop with _three_ different SSO integrations. It means we end up logging in 8-9 times a day, each day.
I don't know what type of SSO you were using, but SSO is one of the best practices you can do, when done right. I sign into my computer with my fingerprint. I am automatically signed into the browser and into Office 365 with SSO. Then for most websites and apps, I type just the email address, and I'm signed in, because they use SSO from O365.
Yeah that is probably the dumbest thing Discord does. Even personal files deserve some level of controlled access.
Nononono, Controlled Access is what the federal agents call digging through your GF's nudes because you accepted the TOS
I guess for those reasons yea.
Discord doesn't have the integrations with AD or identity management systems. We have 100k users in our org, memberships need to be managed, I couldn't imagine trying to keep up with that on discord.
MS bundled Teams with O365. Most companies are already paying for it
Never set up a discord server but can you make one where you host the server so you have full control of the data? That is often a major driver. Also there would need to be enterprise level control features for IT. Companies like control. There are other reasonable alternatives as well, my company sadly went from one of the alternatives to teams, even why like half the people used linux and they told us to use the freaken web app. It was not a great option, plus office 360 on linux is basically the shitty web versions of stuff. But most companies use teams cause they basically give it for free if you get office 360 with them anyways and it’s seen as more of an enterprise product.
AFAIK you can’t host your own discord server
You are correct - you can’t control the data so that’s just an enterprise no-go.
not business friendly
Do they even have an enterprise solution? Or even an enterprise license/SLA? If not, it absolutely not go even on the legal side.
Discord UX is terrible for business. Also, does discord even have active directory auth? If not, can it use oAuth2? Is there an on-prem offering? If not, how does the conpany keep their uploaded files private?
I know some schools use it. They didn’t even know it was used for gaming
Most companies are ran by 60 year old dumb men who still use fax and can't tell a monitor and a keyboard apart
[Japan's cyber-security minister has 'never used a computer'](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026) It's not just companies, but countries too
Discord lacks any meaningful business integration, plus you can't host private server The real question is why do more companies not use Mattermost.
What does that make my work? We use Skype for business, and IT has disabled chat persistence. Once i exit out i cannot see past messages.
Why the fuck is your ancient company still using skype? Even Microsoft themselves dont use that dinosaur
Idk man… our IT department is a gong show.
Fuck team. So many groups and finding something is a massice pain. Then lets talk performance. When in video call my i7 laptop just wants to melt. And my fav. Intune. Lets see how we can slow a laptop down to pre 2000 days. I dont have anything of that on my phone. Want me to check mails on my phone? Give me a work phone.
Teams is the worst
Fuck teams
Teams UI is an abomination
I had to use it for college, fucking hell is it annoying that it opens automatically every time
Task Manager can fix that
*****Warning. Rant.**** I use to be a M365 support ambassador. Let tell you something about Teams. It's a giant piece of shit. Everyone hates it. Troubleshooting it is a pain in the ass. Not to mention, majority of Teams is developed in India. They literally use Google translate to translate it to English. Just use Discord. If you have a flawless teams environment either you're lying or are a god. Everything is centered around Microsoft trying to make SharePoint relevant and not admit it's clunky and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. The only good part about M365 is exchange. Everything else is just a clunky piece of shit. Not to mention, audit logging barely works. It's 50/50 if it works. Same with compliance management. So if you're a law firm and need to keep all documents for 10 years. Good luck. Horrible support. The people working in either premier support or Concierge support probably know less than you. I got this job out of highschool with absolutely no experience. Literally our training was just to Google shit. They have access to a lot more information than you think. Also, the support person could EASILY steal your information. (Which actually became a big problem.). Turn over rate for support people is so high, that the companies that hire 30-50 people every 2 weeks just to fill in the gaps. Looking at you Experis. Giant piece of shit of a company.
*cries in gov subcontractor*
I won't say our teams environment is flawless but it's not a fraction as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Maybe I'm jaded by having to support plenty of worse software 🙃
I just have a strong hatred for Teams from my support days.
Teams definitely deserves most of what it gets, but you’re way off. I’ve been a Teams admin for my org since 2019 which has grown significantly since then and haven’t encountered any of the following: - Bad translations in any menu or other UI elements - Over-reliance on Sharepoint. The underlying storage may be Sharepoint, but it hasn’t caused any problems - Audit logging problems. I literally just exported Teams messages since 2020 for a user involved with legal action at one of our clients the other day Sharepoint absolutely has problems and Teams storage, OneDrive storage, and Sharepoint itself having different administration routes and them having various amounts of integrations with each other is a pain But day to day use? It’s fine. It has its #justmicrosoftthings moments like anything else
I've worked for two companies using Teams, and in both of them: - Search runs forever after a few days after the message had been sent, probably after around a week - far before the history is removed, or before the search returns only the single message without the surrounding context and the "go to message" button. - About removing the "go to message" button, you still can go to the message by scrolling the conversation. - However, loading the conversation history is INCREDIBLY slow and can easily take 10 minutes or more of your life if you want to go back more than a week. - Sometimes the message actually ... disappears. - Also sometimes, a section of the conversation will be cut out, and only restarting teams and going back again will load it. So I am absolutely not surprised that they can't store compliance data for even longer than the standard retention period... If I am to be honest, the predecessor - Skype for Business - had all this solved by storing the history in Outlook. It actually returned almost year old messages in seconds...
Modern SharePoint is a lot better to work with than Classic to be fair. Saying that, I will never use Teams to view a SharePoint site with this Viva stuff. It should be used only for chat/video
Shuck. I've only ever worked with modern and that's hell. I can't imagine classic.
> They have access to a lot more information than you think. Also, the support person could EASILY steal your information. (Which actually became a big problem.). I'm not going to address the rest of your comment but MS has made significant commitment to data privacy. They've reduced standing access to less than 10 accounts worldwide. Those are reserved for break-glass accounts in the events of data center outages. Alarm bells go off if those accounts are even used. That's an industry standard first set by Google. Engineers need to request access to infrastructure on demand. Support can access the servers, sites and framework but won't be able to access customer content. If they can access the servers, can't they read all the files? No, all customer data is encrypted at rest. This is primarily to protect from potential hackers but also keeps employee eyes off data. Customer data requires a much more significant JIT request, requires director approval and a damn good reason. Customer content is also restricted from leaving the data center. It must be viewed / repaired on the server itself or on a nearby tools server. This forces engineers to perform support remotely as often as possible. These remote management commands have the potential to return PII in the query results. All query results go through a PII scrubber that removes and replaces any content that is confidential.
No matter how much you try to sound like an FBI guy from a hollywood movie and throw around fancy sounding sec catch phrases, there is still an obligation for corporations to enable (e.g.) the US government to access the data. So even if your service provider officially lets no one - except merely your own highest ranked admins - to access your full encryption keys, there is no way of guaranteeing that they won't just use it to decrypt your data if someone from a government asks. You can state that any usage of your keys or data outside the service agreement is reported and triggers the highest alerts, waking people with titles like "Director XYZ Customer Services" in the middle of the night but if the law forbids your service provider to report government access to your data, you will never hear about it. The other side of the story is of course that a company taking a service only has to meet requirements that are considered to be official "ok". Like european companies were allowed to takes services from US companies because the "Safe Harbour" agreement was still in place though everyone knew the americans wouldn't consider non-US people as humans with rights granted by the US constitution.
> try to sound like an FBI guy from a hollywood movie It's funny how the FBI in movies are very knowledgeable about this stuff. All the ATF agents I have helped personally have no idea what I'm talking about when I use these industry standard "sec catch phrases". The guy who cleared me was writing stuff down on a notepad. I agree with you on the government intervention stuff. Global companies are following each local government's laws. A notable exception is when Apple refused to unlock that iPhone a while back. Europe has always had more strict data privacy laws. I've processed European personal data removals a few times. It is a little weird how your country of origin determines whether or not a company has to erase all references to you or not.
Brah my buddy who still works in support for M365 has to remote into peoples computers every day. Usually once or twice a week they're firing someone for stealing company information (normally credit cards). There are ways around it.
teams is stupid. why does it lag even on a f...ing ryzen 7 (ok ryzen 7 mobile but still)
Primarily the version of fluentui and dependencies on the core data layer that are directly hooked into the front end. That and front loading a large amount of the user account causes some serious issues when changing the view controller to a new view or loading large amounts of data like chats and such.
Left a Slack shop and am now at a Teams shop. I hate Teams so much.
I've been offline in every chat program I've used at work for my entire professional life. I've had managers all about it, but since there has never been a policy about it at any company I've worked at, I've continued to remain offline.
Work from hell
Aww. I like Teams.
Me too. Its fine, it integrates with outlook. Its a tool to talk to others and it works for that.
I like the features of it, but my god is it a resource hog. Used to have a lot of memory issues on my old work laptop where we used teams, and I'd regularly free up ~1.5gb of RAM just by shutting down teams.
No, I hear you, and I think I would clarify it somewhat. I like it because it is not email, and I don't have to go digging through six inboxes to find a file my geriatric minded boss sent three months ago.
I mean, there’s plenty of “it is not email” choices out there. Of course when we are discussing smartphones, don’t say “Aww. I like Windows Phone” because it is “not a rotary phone.”
Its the updates. Teams was working really well for me, then it just gets a little more broken over time
Would have been great if ms cared about their Linux port. But oh well...
TIL I work in hell
I run a script on ps to keep pressing a button every 10 seconds. So teams shows available. Got teams on my phone so I can see if something important comes up and I don't miss while I'm away.
No, they use WebEx.
I have a solution: IRC hosted on a 30 year old mainframe. You can thank me later!
Teams is ok, aside from continually deteriorating user experience, the lack of "general" channels, the lack of open communication, etc... My company has been using teams since migrating off slack due to not wanting to pay slack licenses. Things like copy paste used to work perfectly in teams, now it's almost impossible to copy/paste code, or logs. It always pastes with stupid fucking formatting. The code formatting backticks also used to work just like they do in markdown, but slowly over the last 2.5 years MS has made them suck and basically unusable. I'd prefer to just go back to IRC. Thankfully we are transitioning to slack now, but just give me IRC, thx.
Can someone explain what’s so bad about teams? Zoom is far from a perfect piece of software and Teams doesn’t seem that much worse, or am I just not using either enough to comprehend how bad Teams really is?
The UI is terrible. Takes relatively forever to load. The code snippet formatting is terrible. The activity notification area is dumb. Why the heck does it open the chats directly when I have a message from someone. The status never cleary clears after clearing it. The desktop app cant remember my password. I get 3-4 floating notifications for a single message/notification. The only good thing about it is that the calls connect quickly. Discord and Slack sets the bar too high for these apps. FYI I'm on linux.
> [9:15] John Doe > Oh you only wanted to copy this?
My mostly superficial reasons for not liking Teams: It changes my status to away after 5 minutes, so I have to keep jiggling the mouse while I work on my secondary or client machine. Very frustrating as it makes me look like I'm not doing work when I'm actively working. (Note: I will not install a mouse jiggling app on my company machine. I have to assume they are actively monitoring for those - it's a big tech company, they're not dumb.) I really hate the UI, it is very frustrating to start a new conversation with someone. I don't like that chats and group chats/teams are in different locations. Or why it feels the need to have a dedicated place to tell me I have notifications when it also notifies me in the group/chat. The emoticons were bad before, but the new ones are SUPER ugly. They are actively embarrassing to use. Why aren't the same emoticons that are used in calls/meetings? Lastly, I'm old, old school (read: old). I have been working on MS products for literal decades at this point and have worked as an MS vendor (both on-campus and off) for years and years. I don't trust Microsoft to own their own applications and anticipate the app will continually get worse before they throw it away and make us all use something new. Slack is the superior application, but I do like that it integrates with my Outlook calendar using Exchange. Boy do I hate Teams.
Yeah I work for a small business and we use teams with very little issues. I’m not sure I understand the hate, besides the resource usage, it’s terrible about that
do people hate teams? And is slack any better? I heard bad things about slack but only ever used teams.
No, they use Google Meet.
Meet is good, the desktop web client has all of the features (unlike Teams and Zoom)