A Recipe For Disaster, Microsoft Unites Professional And Personal Teams Into One App

You Gotta Keep ’em Separated

Teams has generally carried a bad reputation with many users, as Microsoft endeavours to find a way to develop an app even worse than Skype.  In business usage, it’s integration with SharePoint Online does make it useful for collaboration, but for anything more than basic meetings or large meetings with a single presenter the competition has much better products.  For personal usage Teams has seen little penetration, it doesn’t offer anything more than Skype does and again, the competition simply has better products.

Microsoft have risen to the challenge and found a way to make Teams even worse, completely unifying the personal, educational and business versions of Teams.

If you happen to be one of the few that use the personal version of Teams you now run the risk of having interesting comments from your friends and family pop up on your screen while sharing it during a work presentation.  The tone of the messages received from friends is unlikely to match your communication style at work, even leaving out the vulgarity.  Depending on what you discuss with your personal acquaintances, the messages could be quite embarrassing to have pop up on your screen, even briefly, while having a discussion with your boss or professor.

There is also the concerns about security to consider.  Hopefully those you work with are particularly careful with what you click on while at work, but what about their personal accounts?  How about your friends and family members?  Is there a chance they may manage to infect their machines with something particularly nasty that could be unwittingly transmitted over Teams?

You can bet that attackers consider this a wonderful gift, as they will be able to leverage your the Teams accounts of your personal acquaintances and online friends to launch attacks into your workplace’s infrastructure.  The merged app is now available for download, thankfully Microsoft is not yet pushing it out as a standard Teams update.  Once Microsoft has a chance to fix some of the inevitable bugs that the first users of the unified app they likely will push it to everyone.

Here’s hoping they are bright enough to maintain two update channels, one for work and school only and one that unifies the personal version into your professional account so companies have a choice to maintain the separation of work and life.