Office 365 won't let you work offline? Like, Really?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
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So,

My network briefly went down today while I was working on some updates, and while it was down, I decided I needed to edit a Word file, and tried to do so using my work laptop with Office 365.

I was greeted with a "We could not verify your Office Subscription" and invited me to a "view only" mode.

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I did some testing in my VM, and indeed, this is what happens. Disable network interface, Office forces you into "view only" mode, enable it again, you can freely edit your document.

Is that really where we are now? An assumption of "always online"? What if you are on a plane without internet service? Or just plain out of WIFI range, or what if the network goes down? It's insane.

This enraged me to no end when it was single player games, but for something like Office, this enters a "blow up Microsoft Headquarters" level of outrage.

An "always online" assumption is COMPLETELY unacceptable.

Our local machines are not, and should not be considered "part of the internet". They are a local machine that may or may not be connected to the internet at any given time and should be treated as such.

This is not the future I was promised. This shit is fundamentally stupid and infuriating. Technology keeps getting "better" yet the user experience keeps getting worse.

Every day there is more and more evcidence that we just need to nuke everything tech related since ~2005-2007 some time and have a redo. We are in some mix of a future dystopia / Idiocracy become reality, and it needs to end, at any cost.
 
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Is the file in OneDrive that is sync'd locally or is it just a local file?
 
Was the last time you logged in and worked from that device-account a long time ago ?

You should be able to use office 365 without the Internet, at least in the recent past it validated itself online once a month I think and could run offline a bit like a steam game.
 
LukeTbk said:
Was the last time you logged in and worked from that device-account a long time ago ?
Click to expand...

What do you mean by "log in?"

I don't use Microsoft accounts on my personal machines, so my only experience with it has been on my work laptop which was set up for me by IT.

I've had it for - what - three years now? Occasionally Outlook prompts me for a password change, but that's tbe closest I do to "logging in" to anything.

I essentially use it like it is 2010. I wouldn't know where to "log in" if I had to.
 
Office 365 would normally require an account (username-password) and being a monthly affair, it create itself a valid local token type license valid 30 days when it achieve to phone home and valid that your subscription is still going that it renew from time to time when it can, if it has been more than 30 days since the last phone in it will go into limited mode.

Imagine the scenario, I have not a valid office 365 account anymore but I block via the firewall the phone in of the application, if the token would be forever how would it work ?

The question being in the last 30 days before the Internet being down, did you frequently used 365 on that machine with access to the Internet ?
 
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yeah 365 has to check in every month, otherwise it does what youre experiencing.
can you tether to your phone's data to get it going?
 
LukeTbk said:
The question being in the last 30 days before the Internet being down, did you frequently used 365 on that machine with access to the Internet ?
Click to expand...

Yep, almost every day.

And it doesn't appear to be a token type of thing. Turn on connection, it works just fine, turn off connection afterwards it goes back to "view only mode" even if it was online only a few seconds earlier.
 
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