Loops components with external users

Hi Jake,

I hope you are well and please allow me to thank to you and your team for Loop. I am very excited about this tool, just as I have been about so many of the improvements and new releases Microsoft is bringing with MS365.

I get it that this is a worldwide race for Microsoft to be on top. Now more than ever.

Unfortunately, my Microsoft story has been sad. I Am Microsoft's Collateral Damage.

It's the story of one small business owner who has been doing her darndest to keep up with Microsoft over the last year:

The most recent posters on this thread sound like they are in my camp. I am all-in with Microsoft. I drank your koolaid and that phrase has lost all its humor. It feels literal. I joined the Microsoft cult and my business is now suiciding.

I've used Microsoft for 30 years. I'm about as creative of a super user as you could find. I have built some of the most elaborate and beautiful tools and documents and databases in Excel, in word, in PowerPoint, in Access. All of it. A few months I got way into the influence of Microsoft on how I think and work. I made an elaborate map, a 30-year timeline of Windows and Office as it aligned with my career.

During the pandemic I set up a consulting business to build Power Apps and Power BI dashboards for nonprofit clients who own and manage affordable housing. I've worked 30 years in that industry too... so I was positioned as a known leader and a SME with enough technical experience to be a triple threat. I built the prototype in Access. I showed it to our leading agencies. Everyone loved it, it's a tool that is unique and very much needed by owners, lenders and investors. I knew I could use SharePoint and Teams to set up a fabulous work environment.

I preached collaboration.

I sang Microsoft's praises.

I paid over $7,000 in licensing fees this year because I wanted engagement. I wanted all of my staff and contractors to have full access to MS365. This investment seemed worthwhile.

I banked and doubled down on so many promises made by Microsoft. I became a total nerd about AI and Fabric and the Dataverse, watching Youtube videos of lectures at Ignite, Inspire, Build. I could see the vision of what was coming, even the parts of it that were beyond my experience, I have worked enough with data systems to get the concept of Fabric, which I was telling my Microsoft partners about before they even heard it was a thing.

Speaking of Microsoft partners I also now have the pleasure of paying SIX different Microsoft partners -- each with a different role -- to help me learn and use MS365 and the Power Platform and the intensity of facing the Admin Centers, where things get added or moved or renamed on weekly basis. Another $5K spent this year train, to set up users, groups and environments, to build one Power BI dashboard.

Each time there is a bug or a setting or a configuration it takes me and my team of Microsoft partners at least a couple/few hours to follow the path of published documentation (and Microsoft's documentation, even critics agree, is well documented! lol) We find encouragement to continue but it is such a complex network of elements. We have found so many dead ends. I still have to pay them for their time.

After all of this, I barely have one Power BI dashboard built. Connecting the clients to that is no cake walk either!!

I have invested myself fully. Like an entrepreneur will. But I do not have one person who has followed me. Not in Teams or Planner or Loop or ToDo or One Note or even in the Power Platform.

My staff, my contractors, my clients, they have all but given up. The only app people use is Teams chat. This is a common refrain amongst my clients who also say "I Hate Teams." BTW the General Channel in Teams and the way SharePoint folders are labelled in Teams makes ZERO sense to any of us.

Working with the IT folks of clients in Microsoft shops has been illuminating as well. They are lost about security and admin settings. I've heard stories from my contractors about companies with 500 employees, even 10,000 employees, and they are not even allowing external users to Teams because there's no room on their priority list to figure out how to do that, they now need to learn the new Entra ID center and accompanying settings in a dozen other new admin centers. Hard to call that a very collaborative solution.

What a sad thing. I coulda converted them.

Instead I am nursing my wounds and tallying up carnage. How many hours of my life have I wasted this year?

I am a realistic person. Noone else on my Team, let alone my clients, is going to put the kind of time in that I have to learn how to navigate through the massive and now rather messy universe of MS365. You have given us way too many options to choose from. "Over-optimalized" is the term one of my MS partners uses to describe it. I think it would be easier to build a Harry Potter castle from a big plastic tub of Legos without instructions or a picture than it is to set up a SharePoint/MS365 environment. Today I have to say that seems like a project more worthy of my efforts and whole lot less expensive.

Lost opportunity for y'all, too. I could be selling more licenses for you. I could be getting my clients (including big banks, investors, big government agencies) to purchase MS365 or upgrades or Power BI or Azure storage. For Life.

Come to think of it, I could probably take the test and be certified as a partner myself at this point. Which I would not in good conscience do, because I have lost faith. My head is hanging low. I think it's going to be like this forever at Microsoft and I don't think AI is going to save you guys from constant change. It seems like the opposite, like its only spurring you on to a pace you can't support or keep up with.

But like I said at the beginning: I sure did love Loop. I think I kinda get why configuring to add external users is a technical challenge (sort of). I want to express how my heart sank when I finally found this thread and read your responses Jake. I've spent 30+ hours building and troubleshooting Loop lists and workspaces, noticing changes to the UI every single day... believing fully that I was building a collaborative project management and "productivity" tool, only to learn from your comments above that all of my efforts were futile. It's not even supported. This support does not yet even appear on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

My experience over the last six months gave me no indication that I should have expected this:

1. When I first discovered Loop I noticed that the icon did not show up in group chats that included external users.
2. When I noticed about six weeks ago that the icon was appearing as an option with external users... guess what I did? I used it!
3. Nowhere in Teams did I get a pop-up or help text telling me this feature was "not available" or "coming soon."
4. We dug into the documentation which says nowhere that external users are a thing we could look forward to at some future date.
5. Au contraire! Right there in Teams I was given a pop-up saying I can provide access to a selected user (a properly invited/accepted Entra ID External User/Guest).

Loop Guest Access Message

6. The pop-up has consistently shown me a clickable button that says GRANT ACCESS.
   Guest Loop Pop Up
   
7. How many times do you suppose we tried that?
8. How much did I pay my Microsoft partners to help me follow trails of hope-inducing documentation, setting policies and configuring settings to figure this out?
9. Too much.

We have found many similar dead-ends this year across all of the MS365 Apps. It has been a true roller coaster ride with me getting people excited and then disappointing them. One step forward, two steps back. Over and over again this year.

Point being, when you break too many promises, people don't trust you anymore. None of my beef is impatience that MS has not figured out the solution I need yet. I would've waited. I would've created a power automate work around.

Just slow your roll, Microsoft, please. Don't lean on "we're in preview mode" as an excuse for major functionality that isn't there. Don't make a UI that makes it LOOK like I will find a solution and end up wasting anyone's incredibly precious time and money. That's how the new Teams release went too. We were at a fragile place and it was SO BUGGY. I had real attrition happen there.

I have spent another $50,000 on trainers and builders and data architecture and security policies and power apps and power BI design. Don't even get me started on the process of Power Platform admin, roles (hundreds of them!), and Azure portal settings to set up a development environment.

So here I am a year later, at 3 in the morning, $65k invested, thousands of my own hours earnestly spent to build productivity tools. To collaborate with my team. It has cost my staff more stress, it has cost me extra time to pay my consultants. It has made my clients lose confidence. It's had me working 10-12 hour days trying to keep up with MS's rapid-fire changes and surprises and bugs only maybe to find a fleeting moment of a rainbow that hints at treasured future features ... before it's broken again.

Jake, I hope you can see that this is not directed at you. I hope you can pass it along to someone at Microsoft who would want to know that I have believed Microsoft when it kept selling me the next big exciting solutions with big huge exciting promises. No code? Low code? Easy access? Co-authoring? Everything I need?

Productivity and collaboration?

Not so much.

Microsoft has killed my work relationships. Probably my whole business.

Microsoft's product page confirms it is a "Known Issue." I haven't seen any indications that it's coming soon. I submitted a request through our company. You may want to upvote the feature request in their "Feedback Portal" entry on this issue.

Confirmation that it isn't possible on Known Issues page:

Overview of Loop components in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem | Microsoft Learn

PLEASE UPVOTE in the Feedback Portal:

Share Loop Components with External Users · Community (microsoft.com)

I'd also like to hear of any updates to this..

Will pile on here.. external sharing is an essential component, without it it is unusable. The second you add any sort of consultant, external contractor etc to the team you can't use this any more. What's the point?

Without the external sharing functionality my team won't be able to use this. Is there any update on when that feature enhancement might be prioritized from the backlog?