By Dennis D. McDonald

I subscribe to Microsoft's Office 365 service and frequently use my account there along with standard Microsoft Office tools both online (via Chrome or Safari) and locally. One of my clients also uses Microsoft SharePoint to support our proposal work and collaboration so I have subscriptions (and a separate Outlook account) there as well.

Most of my interaction with these tools is via a MacBook Air or a Windows 10 computer on which the Office products are installed. Occasionally I use my Ubuntu Linux machine to edit documents using the online versions of Word or Excel via that machine's Chrome browser. I'm pretty happy with how the online and local versions of the Office products work and for online collaboration and user interface quality I find them far superior -- and easier to use -- than Google's Drive.

This morning I received a message (see above image) asking "Do you have enough uninterrupted time to get your work done?" My first two questions were "Who wants to know?" and "How do you know this?" It took me a bit of digging to find out it was Microsoft asking but I could not tell right away which Microsoft it was -- my Microsoft or my client's Microsoft? Or both? Most of my calendar use is through my iPhone which is synced to my Google calendar -- I rarely on my own use either my or my client's Microsoft Outlook calendar -- so the issue of my meeting attendance was in question.

Anyway, a cursory check of the "MyAnalytics" web site showed it would take a lot more digging to figure out what is and is not included in these reports, time I don't have right now. I will check into this and report back.

By the way, don't bother reminding me that "if you're online you're being tracked." I know all that. But when someone out of the blue tells me something about my "collaboration time" given how many ways there are to define that term I'm interested. How about you?

Copyright (c) 2020 by Dennis D. McDonald

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