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.
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.