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Figuring Out What to do with User-Owned Loop Workspaces
I like Loop and use it every day. However, it’s an app that seems to have gone off the boil, or perhaps it’s just been overtaken by Microsoft’s crusade to make Copilot part of our everyday life. This thought came to mind as I read message center notification MC929014 on the topic of Departed User Content Workflows for User-Owned Loop workspaces.
This is an old notification that Microsoft first released in November 2024 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 421612). They last updated MC929014 on 5 March 2026 with a new timeline announcing that deployment would begin in April 2026 and be complete worldwide in mid-May 2026. In other words, all the bits necessary to support what is a very manual process should be in place in all Microsoft 365 tenants that use the Loop application.
What are User-Owned Loop Workspaces
Loop supports three types of workspaces:
- User-owned: Each Loop user has a SharePoint Embedded container to hold user-specific content generated by apps like Copilot Pages, Copilot Notebooks, and anything created in their “My workspace.”
- Tenant–owned: Shared workspaces created by users.
- Group–owned: Workspaces associated with a Microsoft 365 group, such as those created for Teams channels.
Tenant-owned workspaces mean just that. SharePoint administrators can manage the membership of the workspace so that when an employee leaves, any of the workspaces that they created can be transferred to other users. Usually, the users who take over ownership already share the workspace.
Microsoft’s Workflow for User-Owned Workspaces
Administrators need to take care of many steps to secure data when someone leaves the organization. The initial steps secure data by disabling the account, changing the password, and disabling any devices connected to the account. After that the mailbox can be made inactive (or, if you really must, converted into a shared mailbox) to preserve its contents and arrangements made for anything important in the OneDrive for Business account to be recovered. Finally, the account can be deleted and any licenses reassigned to other users.
Organizations have their own variants on the workflow for departing employees, but all tend to include the steps outlined above. Dealing with user-owned Loop workspaces is the latest addition to the task list.
Unhappily, the procedure is manual and cannot be automated due to a lack of PowerShell or Graph API capability to script the workflow steps. In a nutshell, these are:
- In the SharePoint Embedded section of the SharePoint Online admin center, find the user’s workspace.
- Add another user as an owner of the workspace (Figure 1). Because they are responsible for managing the content of the workspace, Microsoft refers to this new owner as the custodian. The departing employee’s manager would be a good choice for this role.
- Copy the container redirect URL from the container settings and send it to the custodian via email or a Teams chat message. In my experience, the container redirect URL is the slowest component to appear in the roll-out.
- The custodian uses the URL to open the workspace and copy material from the workspace to another workspace using the Copy to workspace option. This manual copy is the only way to preserve the information from the user-owned workspace.
- If the ex-employee has a Copilot notebook, the process is more complicated because of the range of information that can be in a notebook.
Not Much Automation Might be Possible
New procedures take time for administrators to master. It’s disappointing that the process to recover data from user-owned Loop workspaces is so manual, but no doubt it will become second nature in time. And if Microsoft delivers better automation capabilities, we can make parts of the process like the custodian assignment faster and less prone to error. However, there’s not much that can be done to automate the decision about what to do with the material stored in workspaces. Figuring out what to keep will still need human intelligence.
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