This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It a default change, not mandatory. Money says business users will never see this fuckery.
Am biz. I see it.
Sovereignty is almost the issue that it needs to be, but our 'security' types totally trust MS at their word when they say "it's only stored in your country and can't be touched from here. Trust me, bro."
These are security types who know to ask "how do you know" 5 times, and don't even ask it once.
Onedrive is Microsoft's attempt to make Home Windows users a revenue source by making it a subscription service. This has been SOP in smart phones for a decade now.
Makes me wonder if there is something in the terms that allows them to use documents stored on onedrive to train AI. Adobe is doing the same bullshit and keeps pushing you to send PDFs as Adobe cloud links instead of directly attaching the file to an email. They're doing everything they can to get your data on their servers.
We're no longer the customer. We're the product.
Most likely, there is. In very small print.
I'll make One guess.
"Starting today, new documents in Word desktop on Windows (Insiders) now save directly to OneDrive, with autosave enabled,"
Yeah.
Index it all and train our AI on it.
Sell all your data to the Christian corporate fascist dictatorship, so they can use it to wage psychological and economic warfare on a global scale.
You know how many times I’ve had to tell someone that document they created and have been working on for days was never saved even once and can’t really be recovered?
Lemme guess, hundreds-to-thousands, also the people you're telling it to have business degrees and $100K+ salaries?
$1000/hr billing rates yes. Maybe 10 ppl/year.
I really hope they are incredibly good at a very specific thing that has nothing to do with where tf are their files.
Indeed.
Presumably it's selling snake oil and convincing people to trust them?
well now you'll have to instruct them on how to find anything they saved in onedrive
That’s what they changed. It’s saved to onedrive by default now.
Right, I'm saying that the users too incompetent to save a word doc will be incompetent to find the new save location
I'm sure that won't be an issue for anybody working with confidential, privileged or private information.
I would be shocked if this hasn't had some set of controls to disable it in Group Policy for months now.
This is just rent seeking against Home users.
People with One Drive through corporate Azure sjbscriptions (rather than the free "you have a microsoft login" tier) already have fairly robust controls available for handling and securing private data. There's even special Azure tiers for government work that are even further secured.
This is only going to impact home users and conpanies without strong IT teams. Which is an egregious amount of people, don't get me wrong. It's also a horrible anti-consumer move. But this isn't "Microsoft fucks over their golden calf: business users".
Microsoft can't seem to figure out sync, ever since Briefcase, if you involve multiple computers you invariably end up with more and more conflicting copies. It's embarrassing.
Office itself is insanely bloated is a world with Markdown, open data formats, and easy access to scripting. They used some pretty unethical tactics to make OOXML a "standard" to stop governments from switching to an actual standard: ODF-based Libre Office.
I mean this softly, but I'm going to guess you haven't used OneDrive recently, and haven't used it where it's been set up in a competent manner. The default settings absolutely are not conpetent, espiecally for how messy computers for personal use get.
My workplace uses OneDrive to sync a specific set of user profile folders so we approximate having profiles and files that follow us without everyone needing a personal folder on a network drive that mounts at login.
The only issues we've had are profiles auto-downloading too mant of peoples files and eating drives on shared machines (so you just have your meeting room computers wipe all profiles every reboot and schedule reboots nightly), and I've had some issues where OneNote hadn't actually synced the notebook back to the cloud before I closed on one machine and opened on a different machine so I lost some notes.
Beyond that, it's handled even situations where I have the same file open siniltaneously on multiple machines smoothly. Syncs between login on multiple machines take 3 minutes max, and I can force it faster if I really need by pausing and resuming the sync.
I'm sure there's situations it's still not suited for, like editing and syncing large monolithic files (think video files over 1GB a piece). It probably sucks big time on personal machines where you're going to have a complete mess of every file type imaginable tossed in one big unorganized heap.
But configured correctly, for general business use, it can work very well.
Here's why it matters
I'm going to have to put together a script to block any instance of a headline that includes this phrase. It's so fucking overused.
"Why does knowing where my Word documents are stored matter?" Hmmm... let me fucking think, assholes.
It’s like they feel the need to remind us what the purpose of an article is
You'd be surprised how many people actually need that. My boss is one of them and I constantly have to explain to him why shit like this is bad for us. We're currently in the process of upgrading all our PCs to Windows 11 and I'm trying to convince him to let me install Linux on all the computers that don't meet the hardware requirements. Fortunately we use an older version of Microsoft Office that doesn't come with all the bullshit, but there will eventually be a day where we will have to "upgrade" that too. And because of this, I'm also trying to convince him to switch to something like LibreOffice.
Uploading all of our shit to OneDrive is not only a bad idea because we have our own secure servers in house, but it's also a bad idea because we deal with a lot of files that could get us sued if it was leaked online. We don't even let our servers connect to the internet for that very purpose. And it's not a matter of if, but when windows starts uploading all of our shit to OneDrive it will be a complete disaster. And I'm sure there are a lot of guys doing IT at various other companies all trying to explain to their boss the same thing I am while they ignore the issue.
Meanwhile in LibreOffice-land.....
You'll have to take that up with my CTO.
If only corporate agendas hadn't built industries around a single software suite! If only!
And they wonder why some of us are still using local installed and firewalled Office 2007.
Office 2003 was the last usable version.
Idiots.
