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It basically looks like an "intranet" in any huge legacy company with a hint of social media and "engagement". Given this is related to Teams I'll also assume it's going to be painfully slow and the UX will be terrible.

I wonder though, has anyone actually got any value out of such as "intranet"? Big companies spend lots of resources on them, and software suppliers are happy to capitalize on it (Yammer, Hive, MS Sharepoint & Delve, etc) but ultimately does anyone actually enjoy using those things?

> Given this is related to Teams I'll also assume it's going to be painfully slow and the UX will be terrible.

I share your pain there, Teams is painfully slow especially the browser version. The native version for Windows is an improvement but it still suffers and the version for linux is just an electron app which is as slow as the webapp.

I wonder if an unofficial client is possible, because a third part client which is faster would be appreciated. Currently I'm using some custom CSS to for some personal touch.

I've gotten value out of intranets but not from any of the big-name products you mentioned. Any time I got value it was from custom sites developed by the company and hosted on the intranet.
I've never seen a 'useful' intranet. I'm not speaking something like a team or division's confluence/knowledge base, but an entire company's intranet.

Every one I've ever encountered ends up full of stale info that no one touched in years and half the time it's "Bob's job to keep that up", even though Bob retired 5 years ago.

If you pause the video at 1:24, it's straight out of Black Mirror. Why doesn't anyone care about the dystopian world that we're headed straight toward?

Demand real offices. Demand real human interactions. Demand to not be profiled excessively by your employer, and refuse to excessively profile your coworkers and subordinates. Reject China-style social credit scores.

That is precisely the point when I closed the tab, but not because of the Black Mirror comparison that you draw. I just feel like this already exists and underneath all of the neat AR-style windows the actual product is underwhelming.

Interestingly, when I worked at Microsoft, I felt like they had a pretty good feedback tool. You could not leave feedback anonymously and it went well beyond a 1-5 star rating system. It asked specific questions about projects you worked on with other employees. I remember individuals taking the better part of a week to put together feedback for one another and I always felt like I got valuable feedback.

That being said, Microsoft is like a conglomeration of many companies: some good; some bad. Perhaps other orgs within Microsoft did not see the same success with the feedback tool.

Thank you. It's crazy nobody cares about this kind of practice. None of my friends would have noticed what you noticed.

I guess social networks with "likes" were the first step and now actually rating your colleagues seems acceptable.

Rating anyone anywhere at anytime like in Black Mirror is the next step after that.

I've heard rumors some teams where I work are already doing this. If this ever happen to my team, I'll quit for sure.

It seems that as long as your are going little step at a time, people will accept any dystopian practice (or won't even notice it)

I've worked from home for almost 5 years, and it's been mostly good. But there are some things I've started to realize I've lost and I REALLY want them back. Since every interaction is "intentional" I don't know anyone in my company outside my team.

I've felt stuck professionally, the seperation between engineering and marketing and sales has always been physical. However I often made friends with the guys, and would hang out at their desks during coffee breaks. A few minutes chatting there, and other people start joining in. After a bit of this, I was pretty good friends with the whole department. This bridge I built over coffee, was the origional accelerant to my career. I had direct insight into the customers and their problems because of these conversations.

But I don't have that any more. I'm back in my silo, and I can't get out.

Why does this video feel like watching someone live in a really fancy prison?

Sounds like you don't like working from home? Why are you still doing it then?
maybe because pretty much every office is closed right now?
They said they've worked from home for 5 years, I was obviously talking about pre-pandemic.

(That said not all offices are closed. Depends where you are.)

The company I work for has a Virtual Coffee program where you’re randomly paired with people outside of your own team. It’s a quick 30 minute virtual meeting where you discuss professional and non professional interests.

Maybe you can suggest a similar program for your own company to implement?

The future of remote work is Microsoft Teams merging with Sharepoint? (I guess everything eventually merges with Sharepoint... "Resistance is futile.")
> Microsoft says Viva Insights will include data for managers and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends, but that privacy will be protected. “This means personal insights are visible only to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy,” says Spataro.

That's not protecting, you can't de-identify work that's done by a single person, even if MS magically could do this is completely meaningless metric made so that managers can look busy doing "evaluation".

> by default

Seriously? They expect us to believe that because the manager will have to actually press a button to activate it, that's protecting privacy?

This is very worrying.

How is Working from home without the ability to go out to socialize due to the pandemic all that different from home confinement sentences?

And after the pandemic, I feel like down town areas will become even hotter than before if WFH is permanent. Without socializing at work, it will need to be made up after work.

I've had this feeling for a while, but it looks more and more like a lot of people read the same scifi book and watched the same scifi movies I did - but instead of engaging with the inherent social commentary and warnings in them they just thought "Awesome, lets build exactly that!"
Oh good. More bloat to confuse interactions and add to the jumbled up mess that is teams.