You are a fucking master mind! I wonder what other secret knowledge you possess, and I'm serious.

Powershell is locked down on our machines via AD policy. I used to run a tool from the Windows Store, but they locked that down too. They didn't come for the JVM yet.

For me it'd be better to just run the stupid Teams app on my work phone, but that's always been a hassle because it locks itself and then I don't always get the notifications. My primary work laptop only has 16 gigs of RAM, and having Teams eagerly gobble up a significant portion of that is highly frustrating.

There's been several occasions where I've been building or debugging something, RAM being tight, and the OOM killer correctly deduces that Teams has to go. Makes me laugh every time I finally check back on Teams and realise it's been dead for a while.

The whole "two minute timeout" is a stupid thing anyway. A non-trivial portion of my job is to read and write documentation. That takes time, and you will sit "idle" for a few minutes while reading and processing. My Windows machine would kill the BT connection to my mouse and keyboard, which would sometimes require re-pairing to get working again. For the longest time I thought the problem was the mouse and keyboard, but those problems vanished once I got a Linux dev machine.

I fucking hate everything Microsoft.

I wrote in another comment too: A friend's company scans every USB device. He got in trouble for plugging in his private USB stick once. Are you sure this is undetectable?

I'm trying not to dox myself, but it's a university in Germany. :D

It really depends on what you actually need, how much setup the IT department can manage and how well the change is communicated and managed, I guess.

We use it (i.e. the Element client) mostly for chatting and another open source solution (BigBlueButton) for online meetings, but voice and video calls are possible directly with Element. Matrix lacks the out of the box office product integration for collaborating on presentations, spreadsheets or text files that Teams has. It can be extended via widgets though, which includes at least etherpad and afaik there are options for nextcloud (which has collabora) integration as well, so with a bit of setup, even that could be emulated.

So that would of course require some setup and maintenance and if the company used Teams before, some training and help for the users as well.

And you would be correct, that's why previous comment indicated that you can then manually change your status, which will then make you appear as available. But as you are in a call, teams will no more automatically change your status to idle.

Even better! /j

People don't quit jobs, they quit managers.

My boss bills customers for his on-site visits (technical) wherein he goes on site, plugs in his laptop, and makes me remotely do all his work remotely. I can't wait to burn this bridge when the time is right.

Back when my company was using teams I had a script that would press a button that's not actually on my keyboard (something like F25) every minute, so my teams was always green and it was not noticeable from my point of view

The saying is true for 95% of jobs. People don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses.

There's a natural divot on my desk that does it for me.

But I also have my outlook calendar filled with my scheduled hours so my status shows I am always busy (working my schedules hours).

So hasn't been a problem and it's been years.

And wiggle not every second too, like 1 pixel every 30 sec. That was the only thing I disliked with the cheap wigglers, they were great otherwise.

that's used in excel

Is powershell blocked?

You can try the physical wigglers? They’re like $20ish and can be plugged into a power source that’s not your work device if your company is particular about that too.

It’s basically a timer and a cheap motor that rotates a disc with a pattern that is meant to trick laser mice into thinking that it’s being moved across a valid surface. Some are better than others.

Other homemade solutions would be opening notepad and having a heavy object press a key, but that seems not ideal for random window pop-ups.