Welcome to episode 327 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on March 24th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Microsoft Loop is a public preview for you to start using as long as your
organization has enabled it. In today's episode, Scott and Ben talk about what you need to do to enable Microsoft Loop in your tenant, why it's disabled by default in some of the architecture that's powering loop under the covers. We also spend some time just playing around with Loop and talking through some
of what we discover. Oh look, I can finally add a member, Scott, it only took three minutes for a list of my members to load so I can add you to my super special podcast security group because do you know why you need to be in my podcast security group? I wouldn't know why I need to be in your podcast security group. Had I not spent 30 minutes talking to you about all the other issues I was
having before we hit the record button. So why don't we, yeah, tell me why you're at me to the podcast security. Group so I can get you access to Loop in my tenant. Not that you didn't already have access to it, but I put podcast notes in there cause we wanted to try this and we figured that Loop is in public preview today or I figured, I don't know that I ever consulted you on this.
I figured since Loop is in public preview and I have been having a plethora of conversations about it with different people and playing with it that we should talk about it today. But you can now get to my podcast notes because you got the infamous error message of Loop has not been enabled for your organization. I. Don't know that I did get the error message though so. Well when you first opened it, you. Did. I'm gonna go back to customer feedback here, right? Okay.
So there's a blog post from Microsoft that says, Hey, loop is out. The app is in public preview. I have a lot of arguments about the whole like app when it's really just the website and there's not an app thing but whatever. So fine PW loop microsoft.com and I get a nice air message that says the Loop app is not enabled in your organization. Loop must be enabled by your admin to log in and collaborate with your organization. And then it's just got a signout button, fairly like bland page.
I'll put a screenshot into the show notes for everybody. But the interesting thing is I did get an email like way prior to this. So on Wednesday this week when you set all this stuff up, I got a nice email that said, Hey Scott, you've been looped in. Ben has invited you to collab in their workspace and it's got this nice join workspace button. So prior to this I had not gone to just the loop.microsoft.com homepage and seen the like, hey you're not an enabled message.
All I did was click the join workspace button inside that email and that takes me to a wonderfully uninformative and just poor user experience in that you end up on a screen with an animated GIF of a little spiny purple circle with Absolutely. Is it a loop Zero feedback the page never times Out like doesn't do anything. I've been sitting on this page for 35 minutes. Perfect. And there's no content here . I think it's,
it's just a little spiny circle. Even though I have been looped in, apparently I am actually looped out. Oh and now that you've added me into that security group, we can do some real-time testing. We'll see if it's updated by the time we hit stop on this recording. But I can tell you that no matter how many times I hit refresh over here, it still says that I'm not enabled. For it. So is it a circular or is it a loop? Scott, I feel like the puns with Loop can be endless like a loop.
. Sure. I dunno. , I have to see if I can do like a a little screen recording of it or something. But it is, I don't know like this is just, it's not fun, you know? Yeah. And we can go back. So what ended up happening and why you were not, why you got looped in but can access it is the functionality of being blocked is actually by design.
So some of these blog posts and we can link to it where it talks about this in some of these release notes that came out the last week in blog posts is by default the Loop app is disabled for organizations because they have not sorted out all of the compliance things, the compliancey stuff with Loop yet.
So they don't want organizations or people in organizations to go in and start using Loop all of a sudden and all of a sudden start having uh, compliance violations because Loop does not have all those compliancy things in place. There we go. You need to go enable it first by heading over to your office. Is it the office configuration manager, the Microsoft 365 apps admin center and going under your customization and admin center and policy management and then creating a new policy in there.
So within that policy manager you give, it's pretty simple. So you give it a name, you give it a Scope, which has to be a security group by the way, no Microsoft 365 groups, no distribution groups. has to be a security group. Brilliant. Yes, I have tried all the groups, has to be a security group. And then within Security group there is like your different policies that you can assign and there are 2,202 different policies available. But if you search for Loop,
there's only three of 'em. Uh, create and View Loop files and Outlook, which I believe by default this one works in this enabled. There is create and View loop files in Microsoft apps that Support Loop. I think this one's like for Teams and Word and some of those where we've been able to do loop components for a little while now.
And then there is create and View Loop files in Loop and that one must be enabled and a security group that you're a member of must be assigned to the scope of this policy. And then once you're in a security group with this policy assigned that has that create and view loop files and Loop enabled, you will no longer get the error message about uh, your organization has not enabled Loop. Yeah, I dunno. I wonder how long it takes for changes to propagate through.
So interestingly enough, there's an article on tech community, I don't know that I found one on docs for this, but it talks about kind of service requirements. Hey enable your firewall. Uh, it certainly talks about the group thing as well. Funny enough, they mention you should use dynamic groups like create an all users dynamic group. Great idea. That requires some additional licensing as well. , you're, you're into a d P one P two territory. So you know,
let, let's go ahead and spend a little bit more money to use Loop. I get it. But you create that cloud policy, it's buried in the notes over here, but there's a little itty bitty line like in hey, you know, step one, do this. Step two, step two do this. Step three do this. Step three is wait an hour or so for the setting to propagate before you go ahead and attempt to log into Loop. So your mileage may vary with getting this all turned on and where it needs.
To be and how quick it actually works. So I am not gonna hold my breath then or take any bets that you're gonna actually get access to the Loop app before the podcast is over. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe cuz it's only a security group, I'm gonna sit over here and keep hitting refresh and sign out sign in. So I'm gonna be looking down a whole bunch while I go to Ye Old Authenticator app over here and uh. . And try try and make this crazy set things. Yeah,
I'm gonna, I would like to try Face ID again. Yes. Send it to my authenticator app. There's my number, see what happens. I typed wrong. So this was interesting and while you typed this in, it came out a couple days ago. Today's Friday the 24th. I think this was announced public preview on the 22nd of this month and I've been playing with it for a couple days now and I've had a few thoughts.
One is on how people are comparing this to other products that are in the marketplace, but then I have also kind of been fiddling around and diving into some of the architecture and how this actually appears to be working and how the architecture is the way it is and how some of that's impacted the employee experience. And actually was having a conversation last night on Twitter with someone from the Loop team.
I kind of put out a, hey these are a couple things I've noticed that I'd really like to see fixed and was having a chat with Shane Chisholm I think is how you pronounce his name builder, leading product manager for the Microsoft Loop app about some of what I was seeing and some bugs that again are in preview. I will say that as I've talked, some people are like, we all have to remember that this is preview, some of this stuff will get fixed. But where do you wanna start with this?
Do you wanna start with some of the architecture or some of these are experience or some of how both of those were impacted in what I saw? Well from what I've seen so far, the architecture is the loop logo, a big bus symbol, uh, SharePoint symbol equals heart with stars. A. Heart. Symbol. Oh. A heart with that's cuz Loop loves SharePoint. I know and and really that's about all I've seen so far out of Loop. It is interesting. So architecturally it's kind of all over the place.
I have to say I'm very confused just in, in general about how I'm supposed to think about the flow of these things and how it's all supposed to come together. So I really wouldn't be playing with this stuff if you weren't encouraging me to do it. But you've been coming and poking at me and saying like, Hey have you tried that? Have you tried that? So something I wanted to do yesterday. So I need to go out to the team and I want to make a big list.
Like I need to collect a list of all the dashboards that we have out there. So all of us are product owners for specific things and we all build these Power BI dashboards and spreadsheets that Autopopulate and things like that that show you like adoption of a feature. But we don't have an Uber dashboard that rolls it all up. So what I would like to do is have like the compendium of dashboards. So I need basically a table. I mean I could have done this in a spreadsheet,
but I was like why not do it in Loop? It'll be kind of cool, right? So I went into Outlook and I created a new loop component. I got a button and Outlook that says insert loop component. I inserted a table, I added some columns to it and then I went to go send the email. I was like, oh all right this all looks good. I've got the loop component there, it's all ready to go. Let me see if I can just take that component and embed it other places.
And I, I was thinking, you know, if it's in Outlook, it's gotta be available in the rest of the ecosystem. It should be in Word and PowerPoint and certainly places like OneNote, which is really what I wanted to do was go over to our big group OneNote and also insert the same dynamic table there. Like let's have this living construct. And then I quickly got disappointed in that the OneNote , both the web client and the desktop client don't allow you to insert loop
components. But then it kind of dawned on me, I was like, when I added the loop component into Outlook, it created a new component. It didn't give me an option to select an existing component at all. So I went back to Outlook and I was like all right, I have this draft email, I'm just gonna delete the draft and start over because I've already got the table that I started creating and it's got my dashboards in it.
It's kind of like a guide for everybody else. Yep. So I said okay, I'm gonna create a new email cuz maybe I just missed the button up there or something was missing. Went to insert loop component and I inserted a new table and. Old table. I was like oh well how do I get to the old table? So I went and looked for the old table because I know it's in my OneDrive. So I went and found it in my OneDrive in the attachments folder and now I've got
loop component dot fluid and loop component one fluid. Totally helpful, right? Those, those let me know what they are. So I clicked on each one. It turns out there's another app inside your OneDrive that you end up that's just called Loop. It's not loop.microsoft.com. It's just like a little mini loop app but it can display your loop component in your OneDrive. I was like okay well that's good. So now I want to take that loop component and revet it. How do I do that?
There's no way that I found to do it. All you can do is put like a hyperlink to loop component fluid back into the new email And at that point I got so frustrated I banged my head against the wall and gave up and came to you and you said Yeah, you can't do that but here's all of my problems. So let's go through all of your problems. . So talking to your problems, your issue, I would agree with that whole issue and it being a challenge right now, a challenge and issue.
Something that I hope gets fixed and it remains everywhere yet that really when you start trying to insert loop components, work with loop components across these different platforms, I have not found a way to do what you're asking about either where it's like embedding it because going back to some of the architecture really each of these loop components, loop pages, to me it's still a little confusing about when you have a loop component versus when you have a loop page and what the
difference between them are like a component is technically part of a page but you, you can also kind of treat a page as a component because at the end of the day all these things are just out fluid files to your point that you can link to and even when you're inside the Loop app and if I go to share and like share a loop component and it's in embed provide access to this page and supported Microsoft 365 apps, it is actually the SharePoint sharing dialogue
box that you get where it's like do you what sharing settings do you want anyone, people within your organization, people with existing access, specific people in it is a SharePoint URL for me it's intelligent.sharepoint.com and the URL and IDs and all of those that you can then go paste wherever you want to. And even within the Loop app itself, it doesn't appear that you can like reed those components from other places. It's exactly what you said.
It's a link to a fluid file that then goes and opens up in a browser.
Yeah, it's strange. I think there's a lot of things that, and and I totally get preview, but being billed as the kind of right once use anywhere component, it's just, it's, it's not that thing And it's also unclear what other parts of the ecosystem so, so you mentioned kind of being on Twitter and having a, a Twitter thread going, one of the things that I saw you chatting about in a thread with a couple folks was is it possible to embed a loop component in a SharePoint page
and if not, when will such a thing be possible? Pretty natural thing to say, right? Like especially cuz we're driven so much into the web apps and a fluid file is just a a web rendering thing, right? Granted it Ren renders within the embed and and the context of the Loop app and it knows how to do all that. But uh, it seems like an interesting gap. Maybe I'm being too harsh or I can't like figure out like why the gaps are
there that are there . Yeah but the more I look at it, I'm like oh you kicked the tires, they really like they're rough. You're gonna hurt your toe pretty quick. So it did just work Scott.
I will say I have this up in front of me and I have a loop page open for the podcast and I put a table in it and then as an option there, there is a essentially create this table as a component and it did let me copy the component and I took that copy and pasted that component into our Microsoft Teams chat that we have for the podcast recording. And it did let me paste it and revet it within teams. But you had to start from a component that was created in the Loop app in a page in the Loop app.
Not a component that was created from Outlook or from Word or from another place first. Right? Like I don't know cause and you can even see it too, it looks like you see the component in our teams chat is when you go now for this component the only thing you have is to copy the link and I don't know that if you copy this link into an email or anything like that, that it actually lets you do an embed there. And I do agree with you, I wanna see this come to more places like a SharePoint page.
I would like to see this come to OneNote. Although I will also say I'm a little confused now about when I should use Loop versus when I should use OneNote because there also does seem to be some storage overlap. It worked Scott. I actually copied and pasted now given maybe this is because it all started in a loop in the Loop app, I could actually copy and paste that component now from teams into Outlook on the web, paste it into Outlook on the web and I.
Could not, it did render. So all I can do is copy the link. So if I copy that link, so copy that link, pop open OA and paste the link in a new email in. Oa. Yeah I will do that and I will show you exactly what it did, which is it inserted a link to the web app or to the component to the dot fluid file. That is fascinating. So here's what it did for me in OA , I just sent you my screenshot of OA and I actually have the table in
my draft message. So maybe this is one of those that is slowly rolling out for different people. Maybe it's because you don't have a policy at my tenant. Maybe it has something to do with that tenant policy as well. It. Might uh, it's an interesting one. So, so the other thing I think about here is how much are people gonna be burdened? Like what's the cognitive load for a user with things like access requests now and all that good stuff.
Like if I'm allowed to just take a link to a loop component and go and throw it in a random email Yeah who has access to that? I access review is going to be kind of crazy. I wonder beyond that, can we talk about hold, hold, can we, can we take a step back? So yep, I've got this link. So you're able to copy the link and embed a table. I'm not able to do that. All I can do is copy a link and embed a link. That's fine. But the link is to a site collection called content storage.
Oh yeah. Slash CSP underscore GoIT. How would you even manage access to that? That's like a fake site collection that's hosted and managed on behalf of you in your tenant. And your tenant. Yes and this is the other part of the architecture and this is the conversation that I started having yesterday with the Loop team because you noticed it in that link.
But I first started noticing these when I would go visit my, I was on portal.office.com in visiting just the normal office landing page and went over to my content. I can't remember if I got there from SharePoint or if I went over to OneDrive and went to my content. But different places within SharePoint and OneDrive. Now I actually started seeing all of these different loop components because now these are technically SharePoint
files. So when you start looking at quick access and recent activity, all of these were showing up. But then when I went over to my content and started looking at like my cloud files up at the top of my cloud files, I started seeing all these C S P GOs all over cloud files. So it is every time you create a workspace within loops, so you have workspaces within workspaces, you have pages within pages, you can have components, A workspace gets a new site collection
in this if you're a longtime SharePoint person. The what? What did you say? Content storage. Yes. It's essentially in the content storage managed path and then a CSP site collection. Apparently you are not supposed to see these showing up in cloud files in recent activity and all of those , this is one thing after this conversation on Twitter, I was a little perturbed when this was showing up everywhere because if you click on one of these, you get access denied.
Like there's no way to get into it, there's no way to manage it. It's this essentially super secret site collection that has all of these loop components for these files. It also means Scott, that a loop workspace is not associated with a team or a group from a security perspective. It's its own standalone thing. The loop team is working on hiding those. But it does bring up that point and I would be on the same page with them.
I think they should be hidden if this is the way they're gonna do it, that you or all those site collections should not show up anywhere because you should not be touching them, messing with them, accessing them, et cetera. But I'm also assuming that this is now going to start counting against your SharePoint site storage quota. You would. Think it has to, right? Because it's in the same tenant. Right? It's in your tenant. It's like mine [email protected] slash storage content
slash CSP whatever. So it is gonna count against that. The other thing in Erica Tulley who we've had on the podcast before compliance at Microsoft, she jumped into this Twitter conversation and she's like, this is a compliance nightmare . It's not pretty. Right? Because now you start thinking about like what the compliance team is doing with uh, purview and information protection and D L P and all of that.
If people start putting, and this is probably why you do have to turn it on and they did give that, there's some compliance stuff you yet to figure out if you're starting to put sensitive information in these loop files, someone types a credit card numbered in there, somebody types bank account information in there, patient information that would cause HIPAA stuff.
Now do you need information protection, D L P, all of that and purview and compliance to start scanning these super secret site collections that technically you don't really have access to. It's like I see her point where all of a sudden all this stuff, it's like well how is all this gonna work together then? Yeah, you don't have access to you nor can you grant yourself access to I think is like an important call out. There. Yeah, you can't like do an access request.
You can't find it in central admin. Like you don't have access. I don't know who has access to it. I don't know who the site collection owner is. I haven't tried. So remember how much did you do with the content type hub? I'm gonna so end up breaking something. , did you do stuff with the content type hub in SharePoint Online? I have but it has definitely been a hot minute.
So when that first came out it had this very similar issue where it was like only the person that created the tenant itself had access to mm-hmm the content type hub. But you as a global admin could run some PowerShell to go grant yourself site collection owner rights because as a global admin you were a site collection. It was like a weird security glitch.
I wonder if you tried to go find that PowerShell that used to have to run for the content type hub and she put a line and ran that against one of these CSP sites. If you could as a global admin grant yourself site collection admin rights on one. I did not say that out loud and nobody go try that please. And if you do, do not hold me liable because I have no idea what would happen nor if you should even attempt that just.
For the sake of science. I'll put in some links, toold blog posts from 2020 if anybody wants to try it out and let us know how it goes. . Oh this could be dangerous. Yeah. But yeah and there's other places it shows up too. Again because these are recent files, if you go look in your cloud files, it gives you the page name.
So I have a whole bunch of mine like because I had to try and email with loop components because that's what I apparently named this loop component or episode 3 27 or episodes or meeting notes or all of those. But then underneath it, it actually gives that site collection name to, it says CS P underscore a 5 1 8 2 1 8, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. It's weird the way they get named and, and I understand, you know, I think we talked about this like last week or the week before.
It's a little bit of like just a timing issue for what you do things right, like back to create your loop component and Outlook. It's always gonna be loop component one loop component two, loop component three. But if I insert a table for a loop component and I give that table a title, which you're able to do as part of the component, I don't know, it almost feels like it should go back and rename it in my OneDrive so I can figure out what it is later. But I don't know it's,
it's not a fire and forget kind of thing. But it it sure makes it hard. Yeah. The other thing I noticed is back to your whole like proliferation of content and are you managing it? Are you consuming space for no reason kind of thing. The other thing I've noticed with these is when you delete things and not delete them but say you know you're in Word or you're in Outlook, whatever it is, you insert that component and then you remove the component. It doesn't actually go back and delete it.
It leaves the component sitting there like in the case of OneDrive, in your OneDrive, in your OneDrive. So you didn't have to go back and find it and rationalize later like, oh did I actually need that? Did I mean to have that? What is that thing? What happens if I go back and find it later and I delete it? What else do I break? . Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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I'm gonna keep talking about compliance cuz it popped into my head. I think that brings up another compliance aspect, right? Because now with the discovery, if you have a loop component and an email and you have retention policies on emails, but you create a loop component as part of the email and embedded in the email, should that have the same retention policy as the email and be linked to the
email the entire time? Or is that treated as a separate entity , but now it's an email and it's a loop component in a OneDrive or you created a Loop component in a workspace in a page and then did what I did where I copied the component into the email. So now the loop component doesn't live in OneDrive.
The loop component lives in the super secret site collection, but it's associated with an email which in theory could have her attention policy on it along with team chats, word documents, et cetera. You were about to make a lawyer somewhere like very happy, right?
There's a lawyer who's having a heart attack and there's another one who's about to have a field day like, oh my gosh, think of all the things that'll go wrong with this and all the fun we'll have with e-discovery and forcing people into weird places.
Yeah and it's weird and I think that that is something else that came up in that Twitter conversation is people were also asking, okay, if these loop components are created in OneDrive, if a user leaves and their license goes away, all these loop components go away as well. Would that user that maybe could be collaborating around in
all these other places? I would say yes, but it's not a whole lot different than Office Files when it comes to the OneDrive versus SharePoint ownership in my opinion. You could do the same thing with a Word file, create it OneDrive, share it out to everybody you leave, it gets deleted. I am happy to see that my workspaces and all of that that I create in the Loop app don't go into my OneDrive.
They do go into a site collection apart from me so that if my account gets disabled, my OneDrive gets deleted. All these workspaces in the Loop app should remain. But it is going back to that same cognitive load you do have now with office apps is when does this loop page or this loop component belong in a workspace versus when does it belong in my OneDrive?
And being cognizant of where you create it originally, regardless of where it ends up being pasted and shared is where that loop component is gonna remain the, for the entirety of its life. Yeah, it's tough. , it's gonna be fascinating. And then I have one more I could keep talking about this for while I've spent a lot of time playing with us. So here's thing. Let's do one more. You've spent more time in the Loop app than I have.
I've I've spent a whole bunch of time with it in the office clients particularly Outlook and it it's, it's been a weird ride. Okay, so here's a fun one Scott. If you go into the Loop app, or technically I think maybe if you do this an outlook, I haven't tried this an Outlook yet and you do a W task or a slash task and create a task list and then in this task list I can go start typing in tasks. You can do assignee, you can select due dates, all of that within this page.
And then you are just happening to work around the rest of office and you meander over to Microsoft Planner. Guess what I saw? Ah. . When is a planner plan, not a planner plan or when is a planner plan? Just a set of individual tasks which then gets manifested as 20 different planner plans. When a planner plan is created via embedded tasks in a loop page when. A mommy planner plan and a daddy planner plan like . It's one of those Yeah. . Yeah, you get a new planner plan.
I am now up to like six new planner plans in the last two days because I keep embedding task lists in my loop pages and it gets the name of the loop page. Just to dial that back so everybody understands it. When you create a task list in a loop page that is creating a brand new planner plan every single time under the hood. And then those planter plans tell folks how they're named. With the name of the page. So there is now a new planner plan.
This is my new task in my planner in my tenant and my tenant being the intelligent one that is called episode 3 27 lupus available because I embedded a task list in here. So I did this the other day where I actually created meeting notes for all of my meetings and they were all different clients, they were in different workspaces. So I just did meeting notes 2023 dash oh three dash 23 for the date
they're in the workspace. I don't care if the client name is in it, I don't wanna put the client name in it . But now I had like six different planner plans. One for every single meeting that were all named meeting notes dash 2023. I had no idea which one they went to. I will say I am reverting my, I was like this is gonna cause a nightmare. I don't know how I'm gonna handle all of this because I'm gonna end up with a million planner plans if I actually have planner plans.
I want to see they're gonna get lost at all these other planner plans. And this was some feedback. This is not a bug, this was by design. But I did give the loop team via Twitter feedback. I'm like you gotta hide all these planner plans because you can't do this. Like it's gonna mess it up and they could get away with doing it.
So originally I was like, well I think I kind of want the planner plans cause I want to be able to manage tasks, but I feel like I'd want a planner plan per workspace or I'd want to be able to pick where these tasks go in the planner plan. And as I dug into this, the planner plans are actually used as a bit of a, just similar to how SharePoints used, it's used as a storage location because they could, but you don't need access to planner to do anything with these.
So when you create these, it creates the planner plan. And to be fair, I think if you went into these planner plans and started messing with the planner plans themselves, like adding buckets and tweaking permissions and all of that, you may actually break your loop tasks. Well it's a little bit of that disconnecting experience in that there's the managed path with the site collections that you can't get to. And then there are planner plans which you can get to.
Like maybe those just need to be masked and and kind of hidden away in a hosted on behalf of kind of model, right? Like where you don't see them. Exactly. And that's exactly what they end up doing because if you go into, so leveraging tasks in teams and to do these will end up getting surfaced. So once a task is assigned to me in loop in this embedded task list, it shows up as tasks that are assigned to me both in Microsoft to do as well as in, I don't know where my to-do app went.
I had it up as well as in my tasks and teams. And the interesting thing is is that as you start navigating around between tasks and teams in between Microsoft to do it never sends you back to the planner plan. It does have that recognition that, oh this task. So if I go look at the task that I just assigned to myself, it actually says this is my new task. You have your whole due date and all of that. It links to the plan where it says episode 3 27 Loop is available.
So it has the plan name in there, but if you click on the link, it doesn't take you to the plan. It takes you straight to the task within the plan and it just pops up an overlay. But really the big link there that it shows if you wanna open it up is open it in teams and it takes you over to the tasks and teams and opens it up as a pop-up over there so you can manage all of these tasks within this embedded task list without ever having to go to the planner plan.
So they could absolutely just mask these, hide these, get these removed from the planner interface and let you manage them and to do within tasks and teams within your loop component itself to a certain extent. So I'm not as frustrated as I originally was with how it works with planner, as long as they can just go in and just hide all these planner plans because you really don't need access to 'em. And this is weird, Scott. Hopefully it gets cleaned up, cleaned up over time.
, I have that component that you're editing open and like three different windows between teams and Loop and Outlook and I see you typing in all three windows simultaneously. , I still can't get into the Loop app but I've, I've been over here kind of clicking around as well. So I was able to remember earlier when I said when I copied the link and put it in an email it it embedded as a a link. So I can't get to that site collection or anything like that,
but I can't get to that link. Interestingly enough, that link redirects over to loop.microsoft.com and I actually end up on a page and I'm able to manipulate everything on that page, not just the loop component itself. Interesting. So and I well and I guess from a certain extent it does make sense because you can't do permissions at a component. Permissions are either a workspace or a page and this is why Well the whole SharePoint thing and planner thing is weird.
I also understand this is why they had to do it, right, because if I'm doing permissions at a page level with an embedded task list and I don't wanna give people access to all of the other pages, I couldn't do a planner plan for the workspace, otherwise they'd have access to all the tasks from all the pages. Mm-hmm in the entire workspace. So because you're having to permission things down to the page level from the task perspective, you absolutely need to do a planner plan for every page
in order to do security the right way. What I haven't tried, you can't do a task list and a component. Scott, you gotta go outside of your component. I am outside the component. I'm on a page. No, you're at a component. That little embedded thing. There is a component. We should do a YouTube video on this too. I haven't tried adding two task lists. No, do it up there. See where I just added that new task list?
No, I'm actually on the page. You don't understand I . Yeah, we'll have to do this one please. Okay, so you are not on the page, you are on a subset of the page. According to Loop. I am on the page. It's I I am on, I was able to say title for the page. I was able to update the cover for the page. I was able to set an icon for the page. What. Did you set the page title to? Is your page title? What if a page wasn't a page? Yes. That's not on mine. It's not a.
Page. Oh no, my title is when is a page? A page and then the text is what if a page wasn't a page? I. Don't see. The title. That's because you're not on the page Here, hold on, I'll give you a link. What happens if you go to that monstrosity? Okay, here I'm putting a link in the Discord for those of you that are in Discord and you want to go see this, I'm gonna show you where Scott's page is and what my page actually is because this is fascinating how this is working.
So essentially it turned a component on my page into a page for you. Yes. So we have embedded pages. , I'll put a screenshot in there for you too. Any who come along and follow us in Discord. It's, it's fun. You can generate it's. Great fun . So this right here is Scott's page. Okay. I will put this in Discord. We'll have to figure out how to get this in the show notes or things so other people can see it too. There there is Scott's page. Scott's page.
My page and Scott's page are not the same pages but Scott's page is a subpage of my page. It's absolutely brilliant. I love it. Yeah, this is gonna be a fun and interesting. Uh, that's some of the architecture, some of what I've found other people have asked like versioning, backup, restore, I mean I don't know how that's gonna work. Versioning, they do have it in the page so I can go to like the page options and see a version, history of the page backup and restore.
I don't know. Cause you can't get to the site collection. You can't do like a point in time restore, but also because nobody can get to it. I don't know how backup and restore will end up working with loop components. I mean they're files so you should be able to do a backup and restore, but it appears that nobody can actually get to the site collection to do a backup of it. It'll be fascinating. But it has been interesting to play with.
I feel like this is much more of a, I've used Confluence, I've used Notion, I've now used Loop. I feel like this is very, if you're looking for a product to compare to, I would compare it more to Confluence than Notion. Yeah, it's like Wiki plus kind of thing. It's definitely interesting. Yeah, it doesn't have the database components of Notion. It doesn't have the Wiki esque concepts of Confluence or confluent confluence, but it it's got the fluidity there of like one of those kind of mass
content systems like that. Yeah, but it's all like individual fluidity. It's not the , it's not the greater good kind of fluidity that maybe you get outta something like a Confluence. So we'll. See. You can use markdown ish stuff as you type, like you can do a single pound and then start typing for a header or two pound signs or hashtags or whatever you want to call it based on your generation. And if they were pound signs on a phone or hashtags and a Twitter post.
But it's been interesting. It'll definitely be interesting to play with it. We'll drop some show or some links in the show notes too. Some of the Twitter conversations. There were a few people that came out with some various videos on the Microsoft Loop app. Daryl, I don't know his last name. It's Daryl is a service. Kevin str? Yeah, him. Kevin Extrovert. It's not Extrovert. Who is it? . I'm not good with names. I can't, I'm blanking on his last name.
It's Kevin and then there's a Microsoft Mechanics one on it as well. Strat Vert, Kevin Strat Vert who has done a bunch of YouTube videos and different office things. So view YouTube videos if you wanna go check out some other people's opinions on it. I'm sure we will be back with more as this goes through the preview process and gets into ga. And I have found that the Loop team is pretty open to feedback.
I've mentioned them on Twitter just at Microsoft Loop and that's how the conversation the other day started about some of the stuff I was seeing in planner plans and feeling like some of that should be hidden. So they're taking feedback, what people think changes, bugs issues you find. But lots more we could dive into as well, Scott. So for now though, I have a camping trip to go on. All right. In this 90 degree Florida weather . It's not 90 yet. It's only 80 today. Tomorrow it's 90.
Uh, yeah, see 90 degree weather at least. It'll be cool ish to sleep like down in the sixties. Yeah, there you go. All right, well as always, thank you Ben. Much appreciated. All right, thank you. And we'll talk to you next week. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
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