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

Hi Russ -

Could you give me a little context around how you used the old screen timer feature? How did you have that feature set up originally? What made having the "blocks" of time useful to you?

Thanks!

-Stephen

Nick - 

i hope this works for you, my daughters had changed... And nothing works despite changing it back to a child. I add websites to her list, they disappear when i change screens,  she can get places she shouldn't be able too...

it just doesn't work. My youngest child has the message about logging into windows 10, but then also has the individual account listed. They said today the changes I made to her account, on the one computer stuck... But not to her sisters which is the one that needs it.

sigh. I guess I'm going to have to once again delete accounts to see if I can get them to work like they are supposed too. This reminds me of when I worked  in the computer room and had my own senior level Exchange Server engineer. That pushed me back to fruity computers....

Hi Steve,

The website where you manage your children's access to content will be the same for Windows 10 and previous versions - account.microsoft.com/family.  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). 

As for the settings being able to be customized by device -

I get what you're saying - on a shared computer, maybe there is a desire for more stringency.  Hopefully you'll find that with the simplified settings toggles (as long as you scroll DOWN on the pages!) will help make sure our kids are safe regardless of the devices they've got access to.

Jen,

hallelujah! 

I am both delighted and surprised by your answer, delighted because it is concise, accurate and solved my problem entirely. The issue was indeed that the account on the tablet (for reasons unknown) had reverted from type child to type standard user. Why surprised? Because I'm afraid my experience of MS support in the past has shown this kind of successful response is the exception rather than the rule. 

Yes, I still have multiple profiles to deal with, but better that than no protection at all. She'll be thrilled to get her tablet back in the morning. In the meantime, I can only hope they get you on the case when it comes to sorting out the roaming functionality

• an equally quick resolution to that issue would make a lot of folk here very happy. 

Thank-you!

Nick.