How to Add a Loop Workspace to a Standard Teams Channel

The Latest Iteration of Channel Note Taking

In the past, every Teams channel had the Wiki tab to facilitate information sharing between channel members. The Wiki tab went away in 2023 and was replaced by OneNote. Many people love OneNote and that app is still a good option that’s been joined by Loop workspaces. According to Microsoft 365 notification MC973493 (last updated 9 May 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 472022), deployment of the update to enable adding a Loop workspace as a channel tab will complete by the end of May 2025.

Loop workspaces appeared when Microsoft shipped the Loop app in 2023. At that point, Loop workspaces were personal. It’s taken since then to enable support for the features necessary to support Teams such as Microsoft 365 groups and sensitivity labels.

Making Loop Workspaces Possible

Adding a Loop workspace as a channel tab allows everyone in the team to work on the same content (organized in workspace pages and Loop components) with changes synchronized in almost real time. Like all resources managed by a Microsoft 365 group, all team members have equal access to the Loop workspace.

Three prerequisites must be met before Loop workspaces can be added as a channel tab:

1. The tenant must enable use of the Loop app.
2. Team members who want to create workspaces must have a license that includes Loop.
3. The Loop Teams app must be available to team members (Figure 1). Updating access for the app in the Teams admin center can take several hours to become effective.

With everything in place, team members allowed to add channel tabs can add a new tab and choose Loop as the app for the tab. They can use the channel name for the workspace or choose a different name (Figure 2).

Once the workspace is active, team members can interact with the Loop workspace in the same way as they’d do through the Loop app, adding components and pages to organize content. In Figure 3, I’ve added a task list component to help organize the publication of the next edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Like task lists in Loop components in Outlook or Teams chat, a team member can open the tasks in Planner or To Do.

SharePoint Embedded Container

Like other Loop workspaces, the physical instantiation for the new workspace is a SharePoint Embedded container that’s visible through the SharePoint admin center (Figure 4). Note that the owner of the container is the Microsoft 365 group and the ownership type is group rather than personal. The container receives the same sensitivity label as assigned to the owning group at the time of creation.

The workspace is quite separate to Teams. If a team member removes the channel tab by mistake, it’s easy to recreate the tab and reconnect the workspace. If the team is deleted, the workspace is also deleted like other team resources. Likewise, if a deleted team with a workspace is restored within the 30-day grace period, the workspace is also restored.

Loop workspaces are restricted to standard Teams channels. They don’t support the membership models used by private and shared channels. This is understandable because Loop has only just mastered the art of using Microsoft 365 groups for membership management.

Long-term Replacement for OneNote?

Some commentators believe that Loop will eventually replace OneNote. Certainly, Microsoft development appears to be focused on Loop these days and Microsoft is building Loop into as many places within Microsoft 365 as possible. Copilot Pages is a notable example of a Loop-powered app. It wouldn’t be surprising if Microsoft rationalized its note-taking apps around Loop in the future.

Before rationalizing anything, it would be nice if Microsoft updated the Get-SPOContainer cmdlet (from the SharePoint management module) to handle workspaces owned by Microsoft 365 groups. I updated my script to report Loop workspaces to handle group-owned workspaces, but the detail about the containers just isn’t there today.

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