A Surprising Result when Revisiting Loop Workspaces

I thought I'd simply be documenting what Microsoft's documentation says, but that's not what I found.

When last we met on this newsletter, I shared the results of testing with the new Teams Collaborative Meeting Notes, which are in essence a Microsoft Loop component.

What I intended to do in this issue was revisit something I briefly mentioned in the M365 news issue back in June. The Loop Workspace feature, still in preview, was looking like a compliance and eDiscovery headache, as the content was stored outside the reach of the eDiscovery tools, confirmed by none other than Tony Redmond at the time.

I suspected I would run some quick tests and document this fact. Alas, and as always, the latest test showed that things have changed.

Paid subscribers, we’ll get to the details, but for the free subscribers, I want to give you a brief description of what happened because this is a pretty impactful change and the official MS documentation doesn’t seem to agree with what I saw.

(Screen capture from this page - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/loop/loop-workspaces-configuration?view=o365-worldwide#ediscovery-for-loop-workspaces-and-content-created-in-loop-workspaces showing that Loop workspaces and the content created in Loop workspaces don’t yet support eDiscovery workflows.)

This could mean that what I saw in testing this past week may not occur next week. This feature seems to very much be in flux, as we would expect with preview features.

However, I was expecting to enable Loop Workspaces in my tenant, create one at http://loop.microsoft.com/ with a unique key term in the text, and search across the entire SharePoint and Exchange environment for that key term to show that they are not accessible.

In the immediate aftermath of creating the workspace, my search returned what I was expecting, no hits. However, about 10 minutes later, after copying the component into a Word document and going to document that the Word document would also not be found using that key term, my new search found the .loop file sitting in a hidden SharePoint location.

Interesting. Let’s dive into the details: