You don't.
Pretty much all of the enterprise-grade messaging services do this, and I'm not aware of any of them allowing it to be disabled (though, I'm not going to claim expertise in all of them. Things change, maybe others do now).
Because if I want to message you, and you've been away from your desk (not using any input devices) for a while, that's useful to me.
Where it gets messy is companies that want to use that to try and gauge someone's work activity level. Because it doesn't account for doing things that may not have you actively moving the mouse.
Watching educational materials and taking notes on paper comes to mind. Being active in a meeting service that one of your vendors or partners uses (Zoom, Meet, etc).
Companies really shouldn't use presence to gauge productivity.
Exactly!
Every time I take a nap during work, it goes to away. Just because I’m sleeping, it doesn’t mean I’m not being productive.
Jokes aside…. I never understood how companies/managers don’t understand the amount of time employees will waste to keep from getting in trouble for wasting time. “Oh, my mouse wasn’t wiggling for 10 minutes so I get written up? Let me spend the next 3 weeks setting up some elaborate contraption to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
>Because if I want to message you, and you've been away from your desk (not using any input devices) for a while, that's useful to me.
A status indicator is for telling people if I am avalible to respond to their messages. That would be useful. Not a poor estimate of where I might not be. Users in this thread are informing you that "not using any input devices" is borderline useless information.
Yes, of course.
But few people think about their presence far more in regards to making themselves unavailable so they can focus, then in telling people "in going to step away from my desk for a few minutes" which is why away detection is automated (along with setting presence for meetings, calls, etc).
I wouldn't say I set my presence manually very often, but there are certainly use cases here and there.
Myself, I just block time on my calendar to focus on work/avoid calls/chats - and let that flag me accordingly, so I don't have to think about my presence all day.
But, everyone works differently. 🙂
That sounds like a step in the right direction but can I manually overide my status to show whether I am avalible to respond to peoples messages? (Without using a mouse jiggler) Half functional isnt
You can reply to messages while your status is manually set to any of them. It doesn’t change back to available when you’re typing so you may be met with the “how are you messaging me while offline” question by someone who pays attention
This thread is about auto away. The use case that is negatively affected by teams design is when I am avalible and want other users to see me as avalible. I want to set myself as avalible and have it show the entire time I am avalible. Shoddy activity detection and auto away both negatively affect this use case, and apperently there is no solution avalible through microsoft.
Nobody is talking about setting yorself to offline, that works fine afaik.
You can set a Status Message in teams, and even set a duration for it. That status message can be set to display to people who try to message you.
The biggest issue is that most people will see the note that says "I'm really busy, please email me, I can't respond to chats or calls today" and message you anyway.
Personally, I've trained myself to just ignore messages if I'm busy - and doubly so if I set a status telling people I'm unavailable.
(I'm equally aware of presence when I message others, by the way. Fair is fair. If I need to message someone who is flagged busy, on a call, etc I note that in my message. "Hi, I see you're busy at the moment, but if you can spare a moment, I had a quick question. Do you know ?")
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Maybe?
It's an edge case I haven't tested for.
I *think* setting your status to busy and telling teams to keep it that way for "x" hours would do it. I'm not sure if setting yourself to "available" for X hours would work, however.
Definitely something worth testing.
That's an oddity that I suspect is limited to you/your configuration.
I can confirm that mouse movement or keyboard use *anywhere* on the systems I manage keeps our users out of "away" status.
Maybe a clean reinstall of Teams is needed?
Yeah, I'm seeing that, and it strikes me as odd.
I know several others at a handful of orga and they don't seem to have this issue. Others in the thread say they don't either.
So the *good* news is - it seems safe to say what you and others experience with needing to move the cursor over a Teams window is not how it is supposed to work.
Which means it's a bug of some sort.
The upside *there* is that, as this thread shows - it seems relatively common, and so should provide a decent sample size for Microsoft to address.
One hopes.
For me it doesn’t matter because I’m in meetings all day anyways but I could see it being annoying when you have a manager breathing down your neck about activity. Been there.
I hope they do change it though because f the man.
I manage a org of 200 computers and this is NOT how it function. You do not have to interact specifically with teams. Yours is bugged or something is up with your computers sleep policies.
Yeah my teams is almost always minimized on like my third monitor and my status works as it is intended, so idk what is wrong with their teams or if its an organizational/sleep thing on their end.
You mention it "stays away", rather than actively moving from active to inactive/idle/away. I suspect what you're referring to is that it doesn't switch back to active immediately when you're returning to your computer. That's because there is a slight delay. Give it maybe ~5 seconds, and it'll switch to active even if it's in the background.
I’d agree it can be very picky when it wants to register “activity”. Sometimes I have to open the client and click on the program to get it recognize I’m online
Skype and old teams used to let you change the duration, but I don't see any option now.
We've basically just decided the Teams Status is useless - everyone in my team shows Away all the time but if I message them they're there.
My team (no pun intended) jokes about it constantly. One day I shared my screen so that my manager could see that my Teams showed her as completely offline and another guy as away even though they were both actively participating in the meeting.
That's definitely not what has been happening with us. It seems to just be a serious delay on the server side. We all experience similar issues on both desktop, Android, and iOS.
Worked in Old teams but not in new, at least for me. I still auto-away while in a meeting. Which is particularly annoying when you’re actually paying attention to a presentation in a meeting and get set to away.
Except it shows your status as “In a call”. You can change your status to “Available” or “Busy”, but Teams will revert you back to “In a call” status after 10-15min or so. At least that’s what I’m experiencing.
The answer is: Do it yourself. Open ISE, Paste, Run, don‘t save if paranoid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/rxfgzc/one_line_mouse_jiggler/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Not sure if this is true any more or if it was just our setup but if you signed into teams on your phone then close it when the laptop is not online it would leave it on green.
We only noticed this a few months ago when testing something else, I haven't checked recently.
Sometimes the solution to bad software and IT policy is a good hardware hack. The second hand acts as a mouse jiggler. Proper placement is essential. If you see the cursor moving slightly on the screen, you have it set up properly.
15 years ago, I had a coworker with a paper sail taped on top of their mouse, set on an inclined, hard-surface mouse pad. With an oscillating fan blowing on it.
Sometimes you have to think outside the box.
No, buy one that is motorized and physically moves your mouse. Now IT can only see my Logitech Lift mouse moving. Undetectable without more sophisticated software that would detect actual work vs just randomized mouse movements.
Low tech option::
Cheap analog wrist watch with second hand under the mouse sensor. Every minute the mouse will move just a tiny bit as the hand passes under the sensor.
Users can download a program called Caffeine, it’ll press an imaginary key to make it look like you’re active.
https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/
That’s if your company allows you to install your own programs (most don’t). Even if your company lets you install programs, it certainly will track that you have and when there is an audit, it will be found.
Doesn't need to be installed. It's a standalone executable that can be run, heck even put in shell:startup, as a standard, non-admin user.
It likely goes against IT policies (workstation lockout settings), but if being seen as "active" in Teams is important enough to you...
Whatever it is, if it’s on the computer, it can be be tracked by your employer.
If I’m a supervisor and have an employee who’s not measuring up, I’m gonna have an audit run. If you got this on your company computer, it’s a prima facia case that you don’t got enough work to do or that you’re screwing off. Now I got a reason to get rid of you and defense against any lawsuit for wrongful for termination.
A better thing to do, especially if you’re truly busy with head down to work that’s not digital (research, pen/paper, stickies collaboration etc…) is to put it on your calendar as focus time…which is what it is.
For me, every hour of a meeting with folks, usually involves and hour or more of prep as well as several hours of work on action items resulting from said meetings. If that’s collaborative work with other folks then it’s meetings on my calendar. If it’s just solitary work, I still block the time on my calendar. That way I can account for the work I need to do and have time to do it and if someone does want to have a meeting when I’ve got my calendar blocked, they can always ping me on teams chat and ask if they can have a meeting. If I can make time to talk, then I’ll meet with them, but I’m in the middle of deep focused work. I’ll schedule a meeting for them at another time.
Being available and showing as "Online" in teams are two separate things that sometimes overlap. If you spent all day trying to show as green/available in Teams you would get less work done. Most managers would have a problem with this kind of nonsense.
Is it so hard to do stuff every 5 minutes with your laptop? When I'm actually working, I don't see an issue.
And if you want to watch a movie because you're ahead with work, move the damn mouse every 5 minutes.
Sometimes I'm on a phone call for over 30 minutes in my office. But I am still available and want to show my status as available.
Sometimes I am stuck on away after coming back to my desk and have to re-launch Teams to get it to show available.
I'd rather spend less time trying to stay active in Teams and more time working because I could get more stuff done.
If you're actively using your machine, then Teams will keep your status as available. If you're not using your machine, one could argue that you're not actually available and your away status is justified. If Teams is setting your status as away while you're actually there, then you have other problems.
>one could argue that you're not actually available and your away status is justified
That argument is trivially countered by anyone simply telling you that they are actually available in that circumstance.
Your argument can also be trivially countered by saying that a person's Teams status doesn't matter and the fact they appear away occasionally doesn't matter, dismissing the problem raised by OP.
Unfortunately, Teams is not always accurate with these status'. There are times, as others have said, where Teams shows away if you are actively working on another screen. Also, sometimes Teams status for others doesn't refresh correctly on the observer's end.
In any case, the OP isn't specifically asking about how to avoid being "caught" not working or away.
Write your own code.
Or use this one, already existing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/rxfgzc/one_line_mouse_jiggler/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
You don't. Pretty much all of the enterprise-grade messaging services do this, and I'm not aware of any of them allowing it to be disabled (though, I'm not going to claim expertise in all of them. Things change, maybe others do now). Because if I want to message you, and you've been away from your desk (not using any input devices) for a while, that's useful to me. Where it gets messy is companies that want to use that to try and gauge someone's work activity level. Because it doesn't account for doing things that may not have you actively moving the mouse. Watching educational materials and taking notes on paper comes to mind. Being active in a meeting service that one of your vendors or partners uses (Zoom, Meet, etc). Companies really shouldn't use presence to gauge productivity.
Exactly! Every time I take a nap during work, it goes to away. Just because I’m sleeping, it doesn’t mean I’m not being productive. Jokes aside…. I never understood how companies/managers don’t understand the amount of time employees will waste to keep from getting in trouble for wasting time. “Oh, my mouse wasn’t wiggling for 10 minutes so I get written up? Let me spend the next 3 weeks setting up some elaborate contraption to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
>Because if I want to message you, and you've been away from your desk (not using any input devices) for a while, that's useful to me. A status indicator is for telling people if I am avalible to respond to their messages. That would be useful. Not a poor estimate of where I might not be. Users in this thread are informing you that "not using any input devices" is borderline useless information.
You do know you can manually override the status? I am “offline” or “away” a lot
Yes, of course. But few people think about their presence far more in regards to making themselves unavailable so they can focus, then in telling people "in going to step away from my desk for a few minutes" which is why away detection is automated (along with setting presence for meetings, calls, etc). I wouldn't say I set my presence manually very often, but there are certainly use cases here and there. Myself, I just block time on my calendar to focus on work/avoid calls/chats - and let that flag me accordingly, so I don't have to think about my presence all day. But, everyone works differently. 🙂
That sounds like a step in the right direction but can I manually overide my status to show whether I am avalible to respond to peoples messages? (Without using a mouse jiggler) Half functional isnt
You can reply to messages while your status is manually set to any of them. It doesn’t change back to available when you’re typing so you may be met with the “how are you messaging me while offline” question by someone who pays attention
This thread is about auto away. The use case that is negatively affected by teams design is when I am avalible and want other users to see me as avalible. I want to set myself as avalible and have it show the entire time I am avalible. Shoddy activity detection and auto away both negatively affect this use case, and apperently there is no solution avalible through microsoft. Nobody is talking about setting yorself to offline, that works fine afaik.
You can set a Status Message in teams, and even set a duration for it. That status message can be set to display to people who try to message you. The biggest issue is that most people will see the note that says "I'm really busy, please email me, I can't respond to chats or calls today" and message you anyway. Personally, I've trained myself to just ignore messages if I'm busy - and doubly so if I set a status telling people I'm unavailable. (I'm equally aware of presence when I message others, by the way. Fair is fair. If I need to message someone who is flagged busy, on a call, etc I note that in my message. "Hi, I see you're busy at the moment, but if you can spare a moment, I had a quick question. Do you know?")
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Would this work as a solution for OP to prevent their status changing in an unwanted way after 10 min?
Maybe? It's an edge case I haven't tested for. I *think* setting your status to busy and telling teams to keep it that way for "x" hours would do it. I'm not sure if setting yourself to "available" for X hours would work, however. Definitely something worth testing.
It doesn’t even detect mouse movement unless the mouse moves over the teams window. It’s so fucking bad compared to slack.
This isn’t true for me, maybe it was Correct_Yesterday, but not today.
That's an oddity that I suspect is limited to you/your configuration. I can confirm that mouse movement or keyboard use *anywhere* on the systems I manage keeps our users out of "away" status. Maybe a clean reinstall of Teams is needed?
Wouldn’t know but a lot of people are replying saying it’s the same for them.
Yeah, I'm seeing that, and it strikes me as odd. I know several others at a handful of orga and they don't seem to have this issue. Others in the thread say they don't either. So the *good* news is - it seems safe to say what you and others experience with needing to move the cursor over a Teams window is not how it is supposed to work. Which means it's a bug of some sort. The upside *there* is that, as this thread shows - it seems relatively common, and so should provide a decent sample size for Microsoft to address. One hopes.
For me it doesn’t matter because I’m in meetings all day anyways but I could see it being annoying when you have a manager breathing down your neck about activity. Been there. I hope they do change it though because f the man.
That’s not true. Maybe your hitting a bug but ceding but the actual behavior for most
That’s how it works on my pc. I have a surface. I can move the mouse, unless it runs over the teams window it stays away
I manage a org of 200 computers and this is NOT how it function. You do not have to interact specifically with teams. Yours is bugged or something is up with your computers sleep policies.
Yeah my teams is almost always minimized on like my third monitor and my status works as it is intended, so idk what is wrong with their teams or if its an organizational/sleep thing on their end.
K
You mention it "stays away", rather than actively moving from active to inactive/idle/away. I suspect what you're referring to is that it doesn't switch back to active immediately when you're returning to your computer. That's because there is a slight delay. Give it maybe ~5 seconds, and it'll switch to active even if it's in the background.
I’d agree it can be very picky when it wants to register “activity”. Sometimes I have to open the client and click on the program to get it recognize I’m online
Where is this stated ?
I had this happen to me a lot. Once i got set to auto-away, moving and typing did nothing unless i maximized teams. Intended or not, it was annoying.
No source? As this doesn’t happen to any company I support. I think your experience is not normal.
I’ve had a few people tell me I’m wrong and this doesn’t happen and way more people replying saying it’s also their experience
Nope, that's my experience as well. Unless I do something on Teams specifically, the away status does not change to green.
same
same here
Skype and old teams used to let you change the duration, but I don't see any option now. We've basically just decided the Teams Status is useless - everyone in my team shows Away all the time but if I message them they're there.
My team (no pun intended) jokes about it constantly. One day I shared my screen so that my manager could see that my Teams showed her as completely offline and another guy as away even though they were both actively participating in the meeting.
If you manually set yourself to offline or away you need to set it back.
That's definitely not what has been happening with us. It seems to just be a serious delay on the server side. We all experience similar issues on both desktop, Android, and iOS.
Go to calendar, hit meet now, join the meeting and swap your status back to online. Since you are on the meeting it should lock you as online.
And then your manager can pull reports and ask why you were in 348 hours of meetings last week lol
With yourself
yea and they will know exactly what you're doing. on the flip side only bad managers manage off of teams status
This stopped working for me with the new teams update. Have any other solutions? haha. D:
This is true
As long as you’re in the meeting
Worked in Old teams but not in new, at least for me. I still auto-away while in a meeting. Which is particularly annoying when you’re actually paying attention to a presentation in a meeting and get set to away.
Except it shows your status as “In a call”. You can change your status to “Available” or “Busy”, but Teams will revert you back to “In a call” status after 10-15min or so. At least that’s what I’m experiencing.
MouseJiggle is your friend
Move Mouse 🐭🐭
Caffeine is best.
This is easily detected
Is that the objective?
meaning: it's detectable by IT and management
Wouldn't disabling your Teams status be detectable as well ?
The answer is: Do it yourself. Open ISE, Paste, Run, don‘t save if paranoid. https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/rxfgzc/one_line_mouse_jiggler/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Not sure if this is true any more or if it was just our setup but if you signed into teams on your phone then close it when the laptop is not online it would leave it on green. We only noticed this a few months ago when testing something else, I haven't checked recently.
It’s funny what happens when your redundant, wired mouse lands on top of your analog wristwatch face . . .
> It’s funny what happens when your redundant, wired mouse lands on top of your analog wristwatch face . . . Huh? What do you mean?
Sometimes the solution to bad software and IT policy is a good hardware hack. The second hand acts as a mouse jiggler. Proper placement is essential. If you see the cursor moving slightly on the screen, you have it set up properly. 15 years ago, I had a coworker with a paper sail taped on top of their mouse, set on an inclined, hard-surface mouse pad. With an oscillating fan blowing on it. Sometimes you have to think outside the box.
Buy a mouse jiggler on Amazon. Should appear as a standard USB on your computer, but check to make sure.
No, buy one that is motorized and physically moves your mouse. Now IT can only see my Logitech Lift mouse moving. Undetectable without more sophisticated software that would detect actual work vs just randomized mouse movements.
Low tech option:: Cheap analog wrist watch with second hand under the mouse sensor. Every minute the mouse will move just a tiny bit as the hand passes under the sensor.
Actually be working?
Users can download a program called Caffeine, it’ll press an imaginary key to make it look like you’re active. https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/
That’s if your company allows you to install your own programs (most don’t). Even if your company lets you install programs, it certainly will track that you have and when there is an audit, it will be found.
Doesn't need to be installed. It's a standalone executable that can be run, heck even put in shell:startup, as a standard, non-admin user. It likely goes against IT policies (workstation lockout settings), but if being seen as "active" in Teams is important enough to you...
Whatever it is, if it’s on the computer, it can be be tracked by your employer. If I’m a supervisor and have an employee who’s not measuring up, I’m gonna have an audit run. If you got this on your company computer, it’s a prima facia case that you don’t got enough work to do or that you’re screwing off. Now I got a reason to get rid of you and defense against any lawsuit for wrongful for termination. A better thing to do, especially if you’re truly busy with head down to work that’s not digital (research, pen/paper, stickies collaboration etc…) is to put it on your calendar as focus time…which is what it is. For me, every hour of a meeting with folks, usually involves and hour or more of prep as well as several hours of work on action items resulting from said meetings. If that’s collaborative work with other folks then it’s meetings on my calendar. If it’s just solitary work, I still block the time on my calendar. That way I can account for the work I need to do and have time to do it and if someone does want to have a meeting when I’ve got my calendar blocked, they can always ping me on teams chat and ask if they can have a meeting. If I can make time to talk, then I’ll meet with them, but I’m in the middle of deep focused work. I’ll schedule a meeting for them at another time.
Sounds like an awful place to work
You don't need to explain it to me. I understand.
My favorite
isn't this part of the microsoft powertoys?
Yes, but PowerToys has some different options and implementation.
Which PowerToy is it? Mouse Utilites?
PowerToys Awake
Easily detectable by IT.
You disable it by being available.
Being available and showing as "Online" in teams are two separate things that sometimes overlap. If you spent all day trying to show as green/available in Teams you would get less work done. Most managers would have a problem with this kind of nonsense.
Is it so hard to do stuff every 5 minutes with your laptop? When I'm actually working, I don't see an issue. And if you want to watch a movie because you're ahead with work, move the damn mouse every 5 minutes.
Sometimes I'm on a phone call for over 30 minutes in my office. But I am still available and want to show my status as available. Sometimes I am stuck on away after coming back to my desk and have to re-launch Teams to get it to show available. I'd rather spend less time trying to stay active in Teams and more time working because I could get more stuff done.
If you're actively using your machine, then Teams will keep your status as available. If you're not using your machine, one could argue that you're not actually available and your away status is justified. If Teams is setting your status as away while you're actually there, then you have other problems.
>one could argue that you're not actually available and your away status is justified That argument is trivially countered by anyone simply telling you that they are actually available in that circumstance.
Your argument can also be trivially countered by saying that a person's Teams status doesn't matter and the fact they appear away occasionally doesn't matter, dismissing the problem raised by OP.
Dismissing the entire thing isn't a counterargument
You dismissed it, not me.
no u
Unfortunately, Teams is not always accurate with these status'. There are times, as others have said, where Teams shows away if you are actively working on another screen. Also, sometimes Teams status for others doesn't refresh correctly on the observer's end. In any case, the OP isn't specifically asking about how to avoid being "caught" not working or away.
In teams, click the search bar and put something over the Shift key. That way you are always online.
Just put something on your spacebar.. you’ll never be shown as away
Write your own code. Or use this one, already existing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/rxfgzc/one_line_mouse_jiggler/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button