New Microsoft Loop workspace policy coming: Require Existing Microsoft 365 Group for New Loop workspaces

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Microsoft is improving the security of Loop workspaces by giving admins the capability to connect new workspaces into existing Microsoft 365 Groups. This change will allow end-users to choose existing groups for managing new workspaces, providing a structured environment for collaboration. While this integration supports governance, it may challenge scenarios like automatic aggregation of Teams meeting content into a Loop workspace or creating short-term project workspaces. I recommend reading the following post on how aggregating teams meeting into loop workspaces works. If organizations have separate workflows for creating and govern Microsoft 365 groups, now would be the time to look into them and see if they need to be updated to include Loop Workspaces (or allowing to add workspaces) This update is currently planned to be complete by the end of April 2025 but keep an eye on Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 422725 for changes.

Microsoft Teams Guest Access for all (Not just MSA)

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A truly collaborative platform

For a collaboration tool to be truly collaborative, it needs to support not only most kind of devices but it should also be able to include users from across the globe. For some time now, Slack and Google hangout have kind of ruled this space, by being able to bring people together based on a simple e-mail address, and not making it a prerequisite to be a subscriber of their services.

Microsoft Teams first version of Guest Access had the limitation of only being able to invite other users from companies who also were users of Office 365.

Their second version expanded this functionality to users with a so called MFA (much like Skype Consumer federation was limited to users with a "Microsoft" account).

But all that is gone now. It was just announced that the support for all kinds of guest access into Teams will be supported, and here is quick glance at how it looks.

Prepare the tenant

Guest access is controlled by the Admin of the tenant, and in order for it to work, the administrator needs to set the propper rights and licencing in the portal. This is quite easy done like this:
  • Click Settings
  • Click Services & Add-ins
  • Select "Microsoft Teams"
  • Select "Settings by user/license type"
  • Select "Guest" in the drop down list
  • Verify the option is set to "On"


Invite the user

Once the settings are implemented (Note: the setting is global), users may invite guest by entering an email address in the "add member" dialog:


This will send an email to your contact, which will contain a link to initiate the participation.




After the initial sign in, the user may choose download the client or participate in the web browser of his or her choice, and participate fully with everyone in the team.

I have been playing around with this for a while, and I see this as a great development of Teams, strengthening it's position in the market.