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Microsoft IT

Microsoft Places Uses AI To Find the Best Time For Your Next Office Day 55

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is attempting to solve the hassle of coordinating with colleagues on when everyone will be in the office. It's a problem that emerged with the increase in hybrid and flexible work after the recent covid-19 pandemic, with workers spending less time in the office. Microsoft Places is an AI-powered app that goes into preview today and should help businesses that rely on Outlook and Microsoft Teams to better coordinate in-office time together.

"When employees get to the office, they don't want to be greeted by a sea of empty desks -- they want face-time with their manager and the coworkers they collaborate with most frequently," says Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI at work, Jared Spataro, in a blog post. "With Places, you can more easily coordinate across coworkers and spaces in the office."
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Microsoft Places Uses AI To Find the Best Time For Your Next Office Day More

Microsoft Places Uses AI To Find the Best Time For Your Next Office Day

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  • What? No. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ebunga ( 95613 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:05PM (#64469507)

    Nobody wants any of that. Buzz off.

    • It's really idiotic. Sometimes you want to go to an office to have an in person meeting with 2 people or so. You don't want to see 20 people there with everyone spending all day gossiping.
      • Keep your personality disorder to yourself. If I am going to the office to meet with 2 people but also have the chance to see other colleagues then it maximizes the value of my commute

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Better yet, skip the commute altogether and don't go in the office unless there is actually something at the office which requires it.

          • Unless I really want to spend in person time with these people. And if I do, I ask GP again why wouldnâ(TM)t I like to know who else might be there that day or even pick a day where I can see other people too. This is normal human behavior

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Shaitan ( 22585 )

              "want to spend in person time with these people" would not be "normal human behavior."

              They are co-workers, not friends, they are polite and kind because they have to be not because they actually like or care about you. I'm not saying it is impossible to find a real friendship at work but if it were a real friendship you'd be spending in person time with them outside of work, not just during work.

              • It really depends on what kind of work you do, and where.

                I genuinely like the people in my team on a personal level. While I don't get to decide on my own who is in my team, we do consider personal sympathy when hiring, and I'd consider vetoing anyone who I think would not gel with the others at least a little beyond strictly professional work interface stuff. Otherwise we might as well just outsource.

                We do stuff together outside of working hours, but the working days are definitely more enjoyable woth chit

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                  "But if it got to the point of hoping for as few people as possible to be at the office, apart from those you have direct business with that day, I'd seriously consider whether that's still a healthy environment to be in."

                  I think the not so subtle undercurrent you are missing here is that we don't want to be in the office, generally have no direct business to conduct with anyone in the office. Thus such a policy would result in us not having to waste time and effort commuting to an office or limit our flexi

        • If I simple need to have a discussion, we can do it over voice conf. That can be done way faster than it takes to have everyone agree to which dayto be in the office, or waiting for that day. If I need to work with hardware then I commute onsite as soon as possible to get it down.

        • While I can enjoy some of my colleagues and have one or two of them I consider friends, one goes to an office to work, not socialize.

      • Microsoft is using the same differential-GPS setup as John Deere for their monster farm tractors, and last weekend's coronal mass ejections has sent their employees into the wrong offices?

      • This right there.

        The only reason to EVER go to an office is to meet the 2-3 people you need to have a face2face meeting for whatever reason.

        The VERY LAST thing you need is that everyone and their dog is in the office and it's yet again impossible to book a meeting room because the very important assholes already booked them solid (just like it was before Covid) on the off chance that they might need one.

        • One of the joys of working from home, too, is that when I was in a cube farm I'd be deep into a problem and seeing a glimmer of a solution when someone would bust into my cubicle and say 'Can you tell me about...' - and there went whatever time I spent working on the issue. I am responsive to slack messages, emails, etc. but sometimes you need an uninterrupted 30 minutes, hour, whatever, to think.
    • MS locked down Calendaring with Outlook and refuses to support anything standards-based like CalDAV, CardDAV, or iCal collections. This is so they can try to get your own clueless execs and business-fucks to pound the table for Exchange so they don't have to have any cognitive dissonance to their Outlook addiction (Stockholm Syndrome, really). Yes, there are plugins and other ways to work around this, but you sure as hell aren't going to get any official way from Microsoft. This Places app is just another a
      • Oh, yeah, and they did the same for Outlook versus Outlook Express. For a long time Outlook only worked with Exchange and wouldn't support IMAP or POP3. If you wanted to do that, you needed another product: Outlook Express. That was so they could keep the Calendar, Notes, and Todo features locked up for only M$ Exchange folks. Eventually, it became ridiculous, but even after regular Outlook got standards based support for IMAP, they still acted like CalDAV doesn't exist. They won't enable it in any client o

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          I would think the why is obvious. If they didn't lock things down so you are missing features unless you go M$ for the whole stack nobody would use their email/calendaring/spreadsheet stack and if nobody was locked into that, nobody would use AD in favor of free and open solutions and those solutions would all be as or more polished than AD by now. And if nobody used AD then they sure as shit wouldn't all be locked into enough M$ ecosystem that Azure with its high prices would make sense... and that is what

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by batkiwi ( 137781 )

          The outlook/outlook express debacle was stupid, but on what planet is Thunderbird a good app.

        • As far as I can gather, POP3 and IMAP support was introduced in Outlook 98. Outlook 97 was the first version, wasn't very good, wasn't widely used, hence it was replaced very quickly with Outlook 98.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        just like what happens ever day with Exchange (which is a giant crashy PoS still based on fucking M$ Jet databases

        I think almost all companies moved away from Exchange to 365 Exchange Online now, and crashing isn't really an issue that happens. We also don't really know what kind of database backend Microsoft is using these days, as noone but Microsoft has the software that runs their Exchange Online servers.

    • Nobody wants any of that. Buzz off.

      Apparently "corporate vice presidents of AI at work" want that!

      Now WTF is a "corporate vice president of AI at work?"

  • Unnecessary (Score:3)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:42PM (#64469589)

    I've been a white collar worker for a quarter century. Meeting throughout that time have almost universally been a waste of time - a manager or senior team member presenting something that could have been a memo, or maybe a bunch of people discussing something that's really already been decided but few have figured that part out yet.

    The most valuable meetings I've had are the unscheduled hallway meetings as you pass someone and realize you need something from them. And that's just bad communication since you should already have received the answer to your question... You're really cornering people so they can't procrastinate.

    I have a small number of people I need to talk to for my job, and they're rarely in the office. Computers are awesome - I can reach them so long as they're not stuck in a physical meeting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Careful now, if you reveal the big secret they'll realize 99% of what middle and upper management do is a complete waste of time and money and they should be laying off and self-service/automating away THOSE jobs not outsourcing and churning the talent.

      • Oh yeah, I can see the management AI bot now.

        Talk about a nothing setup, I can't imagine it would take more than a line or 2 of AI instructions to replicate 99% of upper management. All it needs is a nice set of formal work clothes

        • If it can't occupy box seats at the local sports arena, if it can't use an expensive golf membership, and if it can't work half-days so it can then 'work' 3/4 days in the nearest upscale bar... how's AI ever going to replace UPPER management?

          For all the heat middle management takes, they do serve a valuable function - they're facilitators, wheel-greasers, and organizers for the workers. Not that you don't frequently see them manage to bump themselves up a level and insulate themselves from actually having

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            "they're facilitators, wheel-greasers, and organizers for the workers"

            Can you think of anything more ripe for automation and self-service processing than that? 90% of it is already handled with workers adding their own objectives and tracking against them. And project managers? Talk about a ridiculously overpaid combination of stenographers meets rolodex at best and someone who actually thinks the word 'manager' there means they should make some sort of decision other than what they were just spoonfed by an

            • I've yet to see a decent sized team that didn't need a project manager. Rarely full-time, but they still need them. There's a skill set there that isn't particularly common. And no, learning how to use a project management package doesn't make you a decent project manger.

              And AI is nowhere near being able to independently assess a project's requirements and resources and keep everything on track.

              Humans will remain needed for a while yet.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                "And AI is nowhere near being able to independently assess a project's requirements and resources and keep everything on track."

                Neither is a project manager, at least not in the pure form* because you need expert level knowledge of what you are building and how it works and a PM only has enough knowledge to fake it to the business side of the house. All they do is record what the experts tell them they need. An AI could run round tables running through the status on a list of items defined by the people giv

  • lumbergh bot says I'm Gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow also I need you come in on Sunday as well.

  • How about never? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by know-nothing cunt ( 6546228 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:50PM (#64469601)

    Is never good for you?

    • Never is ok, but just pencil it for now, I might have to reschedule, I still haven't heard back from Bob about when he'd have time.

  • The developers responsible for this sort of feature just use "AI" because it will look better on their CV? My guess is that if demand for this feature existed in 2002, they would have used similar parameters and scoring for the filter, but called it a "workgroup p2p meeting suggestor written in. NET." And it would have been the sixth bullet point in a presentation written in sharpie on Steve Balmers' naked back.

  • Save on AI research (Score:3)

    by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:05PM (#64469633)
    The next best time is never. Saved you billions. You're welcome! (But also, some people want to see the people in the office other want to go when it's quiet, some prefer the sunny corners and others like the secluded space etc etc AI will soon "learn" humans always find a way to be unhappy)
  • I am not sure I understand where AI fit in this calendar matching problem.

  • Calendars have offered tools like this FOREVER. And, for just as long, the primary issue with those tools has not been technical shortcomings... it has ALWAYS been that people don't keep their calendars up to date - and often don't make them available at all.

  • Reinventing the wheel and ical free/busy information... blah blah blah... There, I rewrote it for accuracy.
  • Can we get chat threads please? How many years to wait after starting one conversation and having to wait for hours when there is need for another one? If I had the power to quit Teams. They just can't stop adding more bloat instead of cried for functionality.

  • What is best for you may not be the best for me. I don't need Places for this. We know the trends in this country. People who want to meet go to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They like their extended weekends, and everyone is depressed on humpday anyway.

    On the other hand what is "best" for me is going into the office when there is a minimum of colleagues to annoy me, and a minimum of traffic on the road. So I go Mondays and Wednesdays. #compliancetrip.

  • Let's see... May I suggest somewhere around 2040? But just pencil it for now, I haven't heard back from Bob yet whether he's available.

    Let's make this an action-item in our next online meeting. Just tell me a few days before when it is so I can find a reason not to be there.

  • So instead of talking to your peers, you can let a high-speed bureaucratic process written by strangers make decisions for you.

    Wait, edit that: instead of learning how to talk to your peers.

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