Microsoft Loop

2021: Application Announcement

In early November 2021, Microsoft introduced an office application for hybrid work in companies. The new product from the software giant is called Loop.

It Loop is based on the concept of the Microsoft Fluid Framework, which the company introduced in 2019, as a way to quickly co-author and create composite documents that include elements that are synchronized almost in real time. Loop looks and works very much like a tool for project management and Notion collaboration, because the application provides a canvas with portable components or a drawing board on which users can synchronize in different applications while they are working on a project team or a separate task. Any user can write on it or respond to a contribution to the overall work of another participant. One difference from the Notion application is that Loop can be used both as a standalone application and inside other applications as embedded components. According to Microsoft developers, Loop components will be built into other Microsoft applications such as Outlook, Teams, OneNote or Whiteboard.

Microsoft has released an office application for hybrid work in companies

According to a company representative, starting in November 2021, Loop components will be embedded in existing Office applications as part of Microsoft 365 commercial licenses. Over time, Loop components will appear in Teams, OneDrive, Web versions of Office, as well as in the mobile application. Microsoft is not yet ready to talk about licensing and the cost of a separate Loop application, but a company representative added that the company will be able to tell more in 2022 when the application enters the market.

The information stored in the Loop component is automatically and quickly synchronized, so users will always have access to the latest data, regardless of where the component is located. The application pages, according to Microsoft, represent flexible canvases on which users can organize project components, such as files, links, or some kind of data. Loop workspaces are a shared space where teams can track all aspects of the project, and there is also an opportunity for users to collaborate asynchronously or synchronously.

At a conference in early November 2021, Microsoft also introduced several additional Loop components. One is a voting table for teams, and the other is a status tracker to collect team information, track progress, and review the latest status in the project. Representatives of the company said that these two new components will be available in Teams chat rooms for Microsoft 365 customers, starting in November 2021.

The Verge noted that the Microsoft Loop service seeks to get rid of the established approach to working together on documents, which involves the presence of a certain conditional chain of actions: first searching for an application suitable for solving the problem > creating text, table or graph and then saving it > then granting access to all necessary people who can later make real-time edits to it. The approach proposed in Loop is to allow the user to solve the task he needs without thinking about choosing a tool and not burdening it with endless transitions from one application to another and vice versa.

Previously announced components of the Fluid Framework, including the agenda, notes and task lists, will be available until the end of 2021. The idea is that by adding appointment notes to calendar invitations in Outlook or Teams, users will be able to collaborate with other participants before and after the meeting. According to Microsoft, third-party developers will be able to create their own Loop components, expanding existing applications to extend messages and integrate Graph Connector with minimal investment. The company plans to talk more about how this will work at its Build developer conference in 2022.^[1]

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