New Year - Same Old Microsoft. The Mystery of Loop Components in Channels
Loop components have been added to channel conversations. But do they act the same way that they do in chat?
I was anticipating another fairly straightforward test this week. The kind that's perfect for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. At first, I thought that was exactly what I was getting.
And then it got weird. Like, really weird. Oh, Microsoft, what have we done?
Special note: This issue is free for everyone as a special New Year’s gift. Normally, a deep dive like this would be for paid subscribers only, but in the spirit of giving after the Holiday, I figured what the heck. Let’s give everyone a chance to take a look at this one. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, or reach out if I can offer you a gift subscription for folks dealing with layoffs or other financial hardships.
OK, let's get this out of the way first. Adding a loop component to a channel conversation looks and feels exactly the same as adding it to a chat message. There's the loop icon and your options.
Because these are being created in Teams channels instead of chat, I expected the storage to be consistent with shared files. Instead of being stored in OneDrive, they were stored in the SharePoint site for the Team. For Private and Shared channels, they were right there in the sub-site dedicated to those channels.
My search for the key term I included in three loop components (One normal channel, one private channel, and one shared channel.) returned three hits, each in the SharePoint location I expected.
This was exciting, as everything seemed to be consistent. Then I tried to collect these from Premium eDiscovery, and things started getting a little weird.
I first noticed that the files collected from SharePoint were still .loop files in the Review set. As. We saw previously when loop components were collected from chat, those loop files were being converted to HTML and had text we could search in the Review Set. These three did not.
And yet, when I did an export of those files, the exported versions were HTML, and when I returned to the Review Set, they were searchable and viewable in a way they were not before being exported. It seems that the conversion to HTML is now happening at export instead of collection, at least in my case. (I went back and retested with a Loop component in chat, and the conversion happened during collection. So there's one area of inconsistency.)
Collecting these from within a Teams channel conversation is another area that becomes a real challenge. The first and most obvious challenge is that the text of the Loop component is not actually in the Teams channel post. It appears there, and I'm sure custodians will tell you that the information they saw was in Teams posts, but if you run those keyword searches against Exchange, you'll be out of luck. The content is being displayed in the Teams post, but's being pulled from that Loop file, similar to what we saw when we tested this with a Word document. The viewable content linked from Loop isn't in the item to be indexed for search.
But that's not all.
We will also have to deal with the difficulty of collecting from Shared Channels.
Shared channels, in general, are a challenge. Microsoft added this option dedicated to Shared Teams Channels to deal with the fact that these posts are stored in the Team mailbox but are not immediately accessible to search. They know.
So, if I try to search Exchange for these posts that contain the Loop component, I can't do that using a data range across all of Exchange. I need to target the mailbox in question with the option above checked.
This requires advanced knowledge that legal teams may not have. You'd have to know that the loop was being shared inside of a Shared Channel before you knew to look for it.
Aside from that, the items collected from the Teams mailbox had Card.HTML attachments that weren't really attachments, while the chat messages collected from chat had the actual loop collected along with it. You can see the difference in this collection, which was done into the same Review Set and included Teams messages by date, which collected both a chat message with a loop component:
There, you have a Teams chat message and then two versions of the Loop file collected along with the chat. (This user is on hold, so versions are being kept.)
But, when I view the messages from channels, it's another situation altogether:
First, the content from the loop is not available. Second, the Review Set doesn't acknowledge a family relationship between the Card.HTML file and any channel message. Look at this metadata:
That HTML file is an Attachment of a family with one item. How is that even possible?
Look, it's early days with this feature, and if we remember back to when these components first showed up in Chat, we had these same kinds of issues. It was so bad that many of us recommended turning loop components off if you had eDiscovery concerns. Eventually, Microsoft got it figured out and made improvements. I'm sure they will do that again here.
On the other hand, maybe someone should have learned from those mistakes and not repeated them with this rollout.
Anyway, if you need to collect Loop Components from Teams, maybe stick to getting them straight from SharePoint for now. It’s not perfect, and you’ll miss any conversation around the content, but at least you’ll get the loop content to review. That’s something.
Let me know if you’ve seen anything different testing this for yourself.