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

This isn't just crazy, it's totally broken too. The website shows entries for each child labeled "No devicesto to show yet", some children have multiple entries for the same device, most of them say they are "local accounts" but none of my children has ever had a local account on any of our computers (they've always used MS accounts), plus I've got a dozen or more entries for computers we don't even haveanymore.

What a complete and total mess! MS, it's obvious you didn't think very hardabout this change before you rolled it out, it looks like it's completely untested , you offer zero support for this service (even the paid support reps at Answer Desk say they don't support it), you failed to communicate anything about the change to your users either before or after the roll out, and several weeks in you've failed to respond even once to this growing support thread.

Are you seriously expecting customers like me to figure how to clean up the total mess you've made of my Family Safety account, and after that, find a way to make this hopelessly botched service somehow continue to be useful to our family going forward? What am I supposed to do with this pile of junk?

I'm going to go try out Qustodio, that's what.

/subscribe

I cannot believe this crazy change. I can potentially see the use for different limits on different devices (can't use the mobile phone after school, but can use the family PC) but the changes made to the web site are crazy and confusing (and I'm not sure they're actually working).

Absolutely agree. I want to manage acces across all devices in one go. Some additional improvements: I want to be able to adjust per day and not just workdays / Weekends. I want to be able to delete old devices not in use anymore

BTW, can anyone on this thread confirm that family safety used to aggregate total time across all devices the child logged into to calculate the daily limit ?  I was of the impression this is what it did, but had not verified on new tablets I've given the kids access to.  Obviously I can't check it now.

Yes, echo the sentiments above.  The old Windows 8 implementation of family safety was my prime reason for installing windows 8 across all my families devices and buying new windows 8 tablets.  Microsoft was the shining light in allowing parents to control access to technology in the house, and now it appears they're walking away from it and adopting apple and android device centric management.

What a disappointment !!!  Was looking forward to the day you added proper control of Ms phones to the list and would have swung my children over to those away from apple and android.

I have one daughter I can manage without this technology, one daughter I cannot.  She switches accounts, computers and does whatever she can to fight to stay online far longer than she should. We have media centres, pcs, laptops, a surface tablet and an Asus tablet, and have felt confident to this point putting my children accounts on all of the them.   Now I'm faced with a page which is unmanageable from a tablet or phone because of its layout, and no idea which account is for which device. And getting separate emails for each device for each child, no idea from the emaí which device its from.  Absolutely lost confidence in MS going forward if they could allow something like this out into the wild.

So I now have no reason to continue buying or recommending MS devices to other families or my daughters school.  Forced to go with the flow of apple and android devices and leave MS to do their thing, whatever that may be.

Angry and disappointed.