Serious Techy Business Thread

During an investigation a few weeks ago, I found out that teams automatically transcribes voicemail messages for some reason. I had a guy arse dial someone on teams mobile from the pub and bad mouth a colleague on voicemail. Its was genuinely hilarious to see a drunken rant written down.

Microsoft-bods, is there any way to see my Outlook calendar on my phone — without installing an InTune profile, and in my own calendar app? I was hoping there might be at least a feed. I’ve invited myself to collaborate on the calendar which means I can see my busy state, but the file seems a bust.

We had this happen too. The university decided to do away with all phones and use teams for everything to save money. 

Now we have folk yakking away loudly using head sets in the cubicle farm office spaces. No doubt because the person who decided this had their own individual office.

We have also had issues with phoning for first aiders from, thankfully minor, incidents in labs. So now we have some phones in some areas, which may work for a bit, then get cut off again. Which is not helpful.

It's almost as if no-one really thought this through beyond the need to save a few quid. 

Oh yeah, I know, but I refuse to put Teams on my personal phone - I did before and it wasn't good for me. Then I undermine that by using my phone because using Teams at your desk can be obnoxious, and also it's just easier sometimes.

They could just give us work mobiles. Our organisation's tech is pitiful.

Most people's speaking-on-the-phone or speaking-on-teams voice is obnoxiously loud compared to the voice they use speaking to a real person at their desk. My office has little phone booths you can make calls in for that reason.

Do you have a cigarette on the go all time too, to complete the X-files look?

Sadly not, but when I'm out there I genuinely want one to complete the piece.

The shift to hybrid working means more proper meetings are taking place from the desk. In the before times, calls from the desk phone tended to be shorter calls to ask a question etc and so less intrusive. Those have been replaced by IMs.

Yeah, I cannot stand doing Teams calls at my desk and usually try and find a quiet corner somewhere. That's going to be more difficult the more people that are in the office more regularly though.

Apologies if this isn't seriously techy enough. If there's a more general tech rant thread can someone please point me to it?

Anyway, 'new' Outlook is being foisted upon us. It's full of those annoying, irrational little changes that seem customary with software updates. Today I am annoyed that I can't drag and drop attachments from emails to save them. You can drag and drop a file to attach, but not the other way. Why the fuck would they remove that feature?

OT, my work have switched back to MS after 10 years with Google. Holy fuck, what a frustrating experience. Word in particular. Everything generally is a bit different and that's frustrating whilst you adjust, but going back to Word brought so many bad memories flooding back. It's so unintuitive. And I hate that IMs are not embedded with emails.

Still, the analysts like it as Excel is miles better, so it's not bot all bad.

Word is a pain. We have to write very long reports with images, tables, footnotes etc and it always becomes a nightmare somewhere along the line. Not helped when we have contract historians with the technical abilities of a medieval peasant.

I don't know how analysts survive without Excel to be honest. The only way I can see it working is just relying on Python and or SQL but even then for simple stuff...I'm never going to work for a company that doesn't have Excel.

We've had enough of a ballache with the half baked new Teams that they're forcing on us. I just saw the "try the new outlook" button and thanked the gods it's not my responsibility to roll that shit out.