Family safety: Feedback on recent changes to multi-device management

Steve

The bigger issue for me is that family safety was disabled without notice or warning.

as others have reported here, they suddenly found their kids had access to everything and had to then go and turn restrictions back on again.

there will be many parents out there who are still unaware of your changes and their kids will thus still be unprotected.

I have a problem with MS removing central functionality I paid for with my windows 8.1 upgrades and devices, reintroducing it into windows 10, then leaving those who don't wish to upgrade high and dry.  Roaming FS profiles worked perfectly well using windows 8.1 and Microsoft accounts before MS took it away.

At this point I won't be upgrading any of my desktops because we rely on windows media centre for free to air TV recording, and windows media centre is not being supported in windows 10.    BTW.  Free to air TV in Australia is very good, and windows media centre is the best DVR around, no real substitutes out there that offer the same easy to use interface or features.

Looks like I'm up for a complete migration away from Microsoft with their current direction.  Android for kids phones with Funamo parental controls, individual mac books for pcs, and Mac mini server with elgato network tuner for TV / file serving, and apple TVs on each of the TVs.

For background, we have one desktop shared between my eldest and youngest sons. They both are very confrontational when asked to stop gaming, they have issues. So to solve conflicts and disputes between them and us I use blocks of time to share the computer and to enforce times when nobody can be on a device. For example my eldest son has a pe class on tuesday & thursday during the time he likes to game with his friends on steam, so for those days we give him earlier access and make sure he is locked out in time for him to get ready for his class. We also block time each day for meals when nobody can be on the computer. We like to be able to login to the site on our phone to adjust the schedule if something changes, to extend or curtail the useage. Pair that with teamviewer rdp and you have a great way to share, monitor and manage the time, applications and useage.

Allowing more than one block of time gives me the flexibility to control the useage without disputes and arguments. I dont care if we no longer have a grid, as long as we have the ability to set more than one time range per day. Without a limit on the number of ranges we can set. My eldest is special needs and so having the ability to control access in a flexible yet rigid way is very important. If it is software then he can't be mad at us, though he doesn't like the feature.

Without that flexibility to schedule the day the software is flawed. I dont care if i have to check multiple profiles that are all named the same just as long as I can set blocks of time. From reading between the Iines it is not something we can expect to see again soon unless you have a change of mind.

Your current implementation would work if my kids weren't homeschooling, otherwise i could easily set one limit and it would cover most cases during the week.

The original system worked wonderfully and was easy to manage, give those of us who want it an advanced view to allow time blocks while keeping the simple new layout for everyone else. If you checked your db you will see how many time blocks people setup and how we used the feature.

Thanks for responding to our concern.

I totally agree - giving parents that flexibility is important.

If you wouldn't mind - could you give me a few examples of why that flexibility is important for you and your family? What are the situations - like needing to have your kids take breaks from the computer - where that flexibility becomes really important?

And with the new Family safety designs - do they feel flexible, and do they meet those needs? If not, it would be great to get some input on what features are really important to you and why.

If anyone else has comments or would like to answer, I would personally love to hear them!

The difference is that when you have Windows 10 devices (including those that have been upgraded) any settings that you set for the MSA that your child has will be able to be applied to *all* of those connected devices.  

For those devices that aren't upgraded, the steps to get set up are nearly exactly the same as they've been - you'll need to set up each child on every device, and then you can still change the settings online.  Each non-Windows 10 device will have a separate report, though, so if you have 3 children on four devices, you'll get twelve activity reports (but if two PCs were upgraded, that number would reduce to eight, because the Windows 10 ones would share that roaming goodness, and if all four were upgraded, you'd be down to just three).  

Jennifer, currently each child's reports and settings has been split ("unlinked") into one set per each device the child uses. Are you saying that this will change with Windows 10 devices? For example, if I have 3 kids that each use 2 computers - currently I get 6 reports. When I upgrade both of those computers to Windows 10 - then I'll only have 3 sets of settings and reports? Did I understand that correctly?  

Thank you.