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Two-Phase Plan to Lift Loop App External Sharing Restiction Starts in Late April 2024
The Loop app reached general availability in late 2023. The Loop app is licensed through a service plan included in the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 enterprise subscriptions. SME accounts can use the Loop app with a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium license. The ability to use individual Loop components (like a bulleted list) in applications like Teams and Outlook is included in the licenses for those applications, but if you want to organize your thoughts in Loop workspaces, you must use the Loop app.
Workspaces are the organizational unit for the Loop app. Inside workspaces, information is divided into pages, which are in turn composed of Loop components. Microsoft is gradually building out the set of components supported by Loop, the most recent being a Planner plan.
Microsoft says that the Loop app is “built for the new way of work.” Strong as it might be as a platform for collaborative creation, Loop suffers from the lack of support for sharing outside a tenant. This deficiency has always struck me as strange. Loop is built on SharePoint Embedded (or as it was once called, Syntex Repository Services). It’s an example of an application that uses SharePoint for storage while providing a unique user interface. That is very different from the traditional SharePoint UX.
Because Loop uses SharePoint Embedded, it’s logical to assume that it would support the same kind of external file sharing for its workspaces as in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. But that wasn’t the case and the Loop app didn’t support Entra ID B2B Collaboration (guest accounts), which is the basis for control over content shared externally. Individual Loop components created by apps like Teams and Outlook are stored in the OneDrive for Business account of the component owner and can be shared by the owner with external users, just like any other file.
Microsoft 365 message center notification MC736437 (13 March 2024) announces that external access to Loop workspaces, pages, and components will come in late April 2024 with full deployment due by early June 2024. Lifting the restriction on external access to content managed by the Loop app is very welcome news. It will certainly help me work more collaboratively with people in other Microsoft 365 tenants.
Two Deployment Phases to Implement Loop App External Sharing
The kicker is that only tenants without sensitivity labels can use the initial stage of external access. This restriction should only affect enterprise tenants who use sensitivity labels for container management, protection, content marking, or a combination of these features. It seems like Microsoft is delaying roll-out of external access for Loop in tenants that use sensitivity labels until it has incorporated support for sensitivity labels in the Loop app.
MC736437 says that “Sensitivity labels will begin rolling out in the first half of 2024.” This doesn’t make sense because sensitivity labels have been around for years. I read the sentence to mean that support for sensitivity labels in the Loop app will come in the first half of 2024. Given that we’re already in mid-March and the initial deployment to tenants that don’t use sensitivity labels won’t complete until early June, it’s a reasonable bet that the second phase of external access for the Loop app will come around then.
How the Loop App External Sharing Might Support Sensitivity Labels
While Microsoft hasn’t said how the Loop app will support sensitivity labels, it’s likely to include:
- Container management for Loop workspaces to mark the workspaces with a level of confidentiality. Given its tight connection to SharePoint Online, the Loop app will probably apply the external sharing settings defined in sensitivity labels to workspaces. MC736437 points out that the Loop app will respect the organization sharing policy defined for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. For instance, the policy might restrict sharing to guest accounts that already exist in the tenant directory.
- Protection and marking for Loop pages. In this respect, a Loop page is like a Word document stored in SharePoint. Applying a sensitivity label with encryption to a page would protect the page content when it leaves the tenant so that only external users with access rights can open and interact with the page. It might also be possible to protect an individual Loop component in the future. However, to make this happen, Microsoft would have to make sure that protected component can be read in other Office applications. No Office application currently supports the assignment of a sensitivity label to a Loop component.
No doubt more precise information will become available in product documentation as the time approaches for the roll-out of full-blown external access to Loop workspaces, pages, and components.
Loop App External Sharing is A Nice Step Forward
The Loop app is a great way to share ideas and work together. It’s not OneNote and it’s not Teams. It’s not like sending email around with a link to a shared document. The Loop synchronization model means that everyone who shares a component, page, or workspace sees the update in near real-time. That’s just different and it takes time for collaborators to become accustomed to how things work. Most of my work is with people outside my tenant. I’m intrigued to see how the Loop app copes with external access and sensitivity labels.
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Is there a way to disable external sharing in loop?