Microsoft released the preview version of the Loop app on March 22. The app works well for collaboration with people from the same Microsoft 365 tenant but fails utterly once external people are involved. Some other teething problems are evident, but there's enough in the Loop app for people to make their minds up if this will make collaboration smarter within their organization.
Azure AD B2B Collaboration and Guest Accounts for SharePoint Sharing
Two recent message center notifications highlight closer integration between SharePoint Online and Azure AD. MC526130 (11 March) says that new tenants created after March 31, 2023 will automatically enable the SharePoint Online integration with Azure B2B integration. Existing tenants aren’t impacted by this change. The associated update, also scheduled for roll-out in late March, is MC525663 (10 March). The news here is that SharePoint Online site sharing will use the Azure B2B Invitation manager instead of the legacy SharePoint Invitation Manager (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 117557).
Rationalization Around Azure AD
The two updates rationalize existing sharing methods with external users and focus on Azure AD as the driving force for managing invitations. The journey toward Azure AD B2B Collaboration started in 2021, so it’s been a while coming. The project makes a lot of sense for both customers and Microsoft (their gain is through reduced engineering expenses).
Ten years ago, it was reasonable for SharePoint to manage site sharing invitations. Today, when the site collection-based architecture is replaced by single-sites and most sharing occurs through Microsoft 365 groups and Teams, it’s illogical for SharePoint Online to have its own mechanism. 280 million monthly active Teams users create a lot of work for SharePoint.
Another factor is that site sharing with external users is a relatively uncommon action today. Most external users join groups or teams and gain access to the group-connected site. Although non-group connected sites do exist, they’re in the minority and some of those sites (like hub and communication sites) aren’t candidates for sharing with external people. And of course, even site owners might be blocked from sharing sites by a sensitivity label.
Time to Review Applicable Policies
Overall, I don’t think the change will disrupt many organizations. As Microsoft notes “You may want to review your Azure B2B Invitation Manager policies.” Two policies are worthy of note. The first is the Azure B2B Collaboration policy, which includes an allow or deny list (but not both) of domains.
The policy is now found under Collaboration restrictions in the External Identities section of the Azure AD admin center (Figure 1). It is commonly used to block sharing with consumer domains (deny list) or to restrict collaboration to a set of known domains belonging to partner organizations (allow list). If the organization already supports guest accounts, it’s likely that the collaboration policy already exists. Even so, changes like this are useful reminders of the need for regular review of any policy that affects how external people access tenant resources.
Figure 1: Azure AD B2B Collaboration policy settings
Azure AD cross-tenant access policies are a more powerful and flexible mechanism to control external access through both Azure B2B collaboration and Azure AD direct connect (used for Teams shared channels). Cross-tenant access policies are still relatively new and don’t need to be implemented unless required for a specific reason, so your tenant might not use them yet.
Although the Azure AD B2B Collaboration policy is likely to dominate for the immediate future, over time, I expect a slow transition to take advantage of the granular control available in cross-tenant access policies. When an organization changes over, SharePoint Online will take advantage. Leveraging advances made in Azure AD is an excellent reason for SharePoint Online to embrace Azure AD more fully.
Review Guest Accounts Too
Azure AD B2B collaboration works but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to manage guest accounts. As more sharing happens, more guest accounts end up in your Azure AD. Some guest accounts are used once to share a document. Others are in ongoing use as guest members of groups and teams access shared documents. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on guest accounts and remove them as they become obsolete.
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Habitudes des collaborateurs, gestion des données numériques, considérations écoresponsables… Les Français sont conscients de l’impact écologique des activités numériques professionnelles, mais la moitié persiste dans ses habitudes peu vertueuses…
How often do you share a screenshot to help others understand a problem or issue versus spelling it out in a lengthy email? If you’re like a lot of people, you may find sharing images an easier way of conveying a message and collaboratively finding solutions.
With Dropbox Capture, an app available in the Microsoft Store to download onto Windows 10 and 11 PCs, you can record screenshots and videos, mark them up, and invite others to comment and markup through a shareable link that doesn’t require a sign-in. Users save time by consolidating feedback in one location.
Aside from being a time saver, it’s also a tool that organizations can use as part of their onboarding or training, as a powerful way to show – rather than tell – answers to frequently asked questions or common processes.
Designers, editors, project managers and many others can use Capture as a more visually friendly means of sharing progress, troubleshooting and discussing feedback.
https://youtu.be/wsy0rD58iTc
“This is a creative industry, so using Dropbox Capture gives us an opportunity to lay out our thought processes,” says Adam Nielson, creative director of branded content at Kaleidoscope Pictures, a film and television production company based in Utah. He and his team create content to attract, engage and retain audiences for clients. “The written word doesn't work for everybody and I’m no writer, so Capture helps me get information to my teammates quickly. Being able to show multiple apps and walk a team member through feedback that needs to be more than a comment, with visual and verbal cues to help round out messages, has been huge. And it also gives people time to react on their own schedule.”
His team has been using Dropbox Capture for the past six months and finds it helpful for collaboration across time zones, as his crew works remotely all over the world.
“I've tried a lot of different things. Dropbox has always just been the most seamless to use,” says Nielson, who also likes how people he sends files to don’t need to sign in to see them. “Capture has helped keep personality and clarity that we can lose in the feedback process.”
[caption id="attachment_178122" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Screenshot showing how Dropbox Capture shares links for collaboration.[/caption]
He also feels Capture works well in terms of accessibility, in that users can personalize the kinds of messages they want to send, in the way that they communicate best. For Nielson, who grew up learning sign language with deaf siblings, it gives him another way to communicate in a visual language.
The idea for Capture came through observing customer feedback on Twitter about storing screenshots in Dropbox, which led to a deeper dive into customers’ needs. That led to developing Capture to include storing and sharing screen, video and audio recordings.
“Since day one, we wanted Capture to serve as an all-in-one visual communication tool and saw the huge potential for it to change the way people collaborate, especially remotely,” said Youcef Es-skouri, head of product management for Dropbox Capture.
https://youtu.be/mSw7aUnphjs
The initial concept for Capture came from Dropbox’s annual Hackathon in summer of 2020. After the idea was born, Es-skouri took the lead on the project, seeing it through from its initial announcement to wide availability last year.
He and engineers on his team worked specifically with Windows because that’s where most of their customers work.
“We all have PCs, we all try to use them as much as possible and we really try to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers,” he says. “We've always tried to be Windows first because we know that this is where our customers are. Windows is super critical for us and honestly it has been quite a smooth ride for us with all the documentation and libraries that are available.”
Es-skouri also says the variety of devices in the Windows ecosystem is an advantage with Capture, which they’ve designed to work well with touchscreens/tablets and other inputs in addition to standard keyboards.
[caption id="attachment_178123" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Screenshot of a screen recording with video in Dropbox Capture.[/caption]
Es-skouri says that the inclusion of screen recordings came naturally as a behavior that aligns with the ubiquity of screenshots. And acknowledging that not everyone is comfortable being on-camera, Capture makes it easy to record voiceovers – a natural extension to how people have become used to recording voice memos on phone texts.
That flexibility in composing content is one of many reasons managers like Tyler Carey have embraced Capture. The chief revenue officer for the employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services based in Connecticut has been working at the company for eight years. Once a publisher’s manuscript is ready for copy editing or typesetting, Westchester will pick it up in Microsoft Word and create files for both printers and digital editions using Adobe InDesign. They create over 10,000 publications every year.
Carey oversees all sales and collaborates regularly with the company’s marketing team. Business partnerships also fall under his purview, as well as other revenue generating initiatives. His typical day includes working directly with key accounts, strategizing with Westchester’s sales team and forecasting revenue.
“We've been expanding our team during the pandemic. We went from an already somewhat distributed workforce to a very distributed workforce where we now have people in several different time zones on different teams collaborating,” he says. “So using Dropbox Capture lets us do kind of the things you might want to normally accomplish in meeting: get people together, look at a project, share a screen and try to solve a problem or collaborate on something.”
[caption id="attachment_178124" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Screenshot in Dropbox Capture showing video trimming of a screen recording.[/caption]
Training is another area where Capture is proving to be useful, as Westchester is testing its use with sales documentation, so new hires can view 60-second videos rather than having to wade through hundreds of pages.
“We've already had some big wins, just making lives easier for the sales reps like that,” Carey says. “What's elegant about Dropbox Capture versus other tools is that it’s very lightweight. There's a lot less clicks and steps. When we had done training videos before, we would record them using an application, download them, trim out any errors and then we'd have to host them somewhere and send the link. Now it's all under one hood.”
Find out more about Dropbox Capture and try it out by downloading it from the Microsoft Store.
Do you remember when Microsoft Loop components were described as atomic units of productivity? Well, I think it was secretly a genius description. I want to introduce you to the atomic theory of collaboration that I believe Loop is leaning into. As more of Microsoft Loop is revealed over the coming year and beyond, this theory may help you learn and explain simple collaboration in Loop. Let me explain.
Microsoft Loop is the combination of a flexible canvas, portable productivity components and the blocks within the components. We add components to Teams chats, Outlook email, documents, and whiteboards. But let’s focus on the components for now.
Loop Components are like molecules, and the blocks inside them are like atoms. The blocks in a Loop component are what we use to create content and collaborate with our team. Individual blocks are helpful on their own. Each block can meet a small productivity need. A list. A table. Or a functional block like a mention or date.
If we use atoms to describe the blocks that make up Loop component, we might use a periodic table format to understand them better.
Where have we seen Microsoft productivity explained using a periodic table?
Check out Matt Wade’s “ The Periodic Table for Microsoft 365 “ over on Jumpto365. It brings together the Microsoft 365 apps and arranges them for different activities of collaboration.
But I want to look closer than M365 apps. I want to go down to the simple atomic building blocks of productivity.
Let’s use a Periodic Table and list the blocks available today to use inside a Loop component.
Each of the blocks are like elements on the table, with their own properties that fill a need.
I’ll start by adding a paragraph to a Teams chat. It doesn’t matter what you start with. Sharing a component creates a page which becomes our flexible canvas for more components.
Type a “/ “ on the page and you will see a list of blocks available to use.
As you continue to type the name of a block, the suggestions are narrowed down.
This is where I lean into the Periodic table, atoms and elements.
When you type the first two letters of a Loop block, it’s usually enough to find what you want to use.
/ Bu is bulleted list — So let’s add Bu to our table. It’s a simple list with no order necessary or implied.
/ Nu is numbered list — a simple list with numerical order.
/ Ch is checklist — a simple and functional list. You can check the items off as you complete them.
See how I have listed the simplest type of Loop block at the top? Kinda like listing H for Hydrogen at the top left corner of the periodic table. Hydrogen is a simple atom. 1 proton, 1 neutron, 1 electron.
The numbered list is slightly more functional. Then at the bottom, the check list — a functional list.
Now let’s look at a different type of Loop block. They are functional blocks.
/ da let’s you select the Date block. You can pick a date to insert. The date displays relative to the current date. Well that’s the relative theory anyway.
“@” Is a mention. Use to search and find the person. It’s a highly functional block because it notifies the person mentioned. They can use the notification to jump directly to the Loop and position in the loop component where they were mentioned. Then get up to speed quickly reading the context before they contribute
/ ta is a table, the most versatile Loop block. It’s like the carbon of a periodic table of elements.
We can create columns to list items and store information about the items. Much like SharePoint lists, only simpler. Create and edit columns. You can drag columns around in different order. You can even add some blocks inside the cells of a table, like a checklist or date.
Each of these blocks are useful on their own, in their current state on their own.
But a lot of people don’t realise that you can add more blocks to a Loop component, combine them, compound them together in the same Loop component.
In Loop theory, we combine blocks within Loop components to meet our collaborative and productivity needs.
Two or more components = a compounding collaboration effect
There are some ready-made combinations of components available when we use the / . They are table templates.
/ Tas is task list table.
Properties are checklist, People mention for an assignment, Date for Due by.
/ vo is a voting table, (available soon.) It has a table with a voting counter column.
/ Sta is a Status tracker table, (available soon). This uses a People mention for assignment, a label for status picker, a Date for due by, and a checklist for blockers.
We can make our own combinations of Loop blocks to fit our needs. Remember, the Loop page is your flexible canvas. Add any block available. Use a table if you want to put Loop blocks in order and store info about items.
Some simple Loop combos are:
Meeting notes
Add a table to list agenda items, the person leading the item, and the time allocated for the item.
Add a section on the page for meeting notes and use a bulleted list.
Add a task list table for follow up actions, showing assignments and due dates.
Meeting notes are a great way to get everyone on the same page, and easily share in Teams chats and email conversations before, during and after the meeting.
Decision making
Again, use a table block.
Add columns to list the idea or decision point, a bullet list for reference links and a column with a people block for assignment.
We know that a Voting table component is coming, with a voting button so show your support. For now, you could mention yourself in a column. The version management will confirm that you added your own name and not someone else.
Document co-creation
Document co-creation is another good scenario for a Loop block combination within a component. You will use an Office application like Word of course, to create the document and publish it. But in the ideas phase when creating an outline, or coordinating tasks, a Loop page would be helpful.
Create a table for listing topics for an outline of the document.
In the second column, add a bullet list of high level points covered in the topic.
Use the third column to assign a topic to a person
Soon, you will be able to add Loops to Word Online and combine these components to coordinate your document co-creation.
Combining Loop components can provide compounding collaborative capabilities.
Do you also see how Loop blocks and components are like atomic units of productivity now? They are elements on a periodic table. Capable on their own. Powerful when combined, providing a range of possibilities.
As Microsoft releases more Loop components, the periodic table fills with elements, till, well, anything is possible.
Connexion
