Microsoft Releases New Collaboration App Loop

What is Loop?

Microsoft kicked off its second Ignite conference in 2021 today, and here's some news to share about the Microsoft 365 productivity ecosystem. In fact, the company today announced Microsoft Loop, a new collaboration canvas that allows teams to collaborate across Microsoft 365 apps.

Microsoft Loop consists of 3 components: Components, Pages, and Workspaces. The Loop component is actually an improvement of the existing Fluid component, and can take the form of a table, agenda, dynamic 365 record or task list, and these records will be kept in sync in the Microsoft 365 application.

These loop parts can be installed in Office projects or synced in real-time to upcoming workspaces and page visits, so they will keep the Loop system updated. The Loop component will start running on Microsoft Teams, Outlook and OneNote this month, and Microsoft also plans to add new designs or elements to it, including a status tracker and polling form. New pages and workspaces will be unveiled shortly.

Using the Loop page, users can consolidate links, files, or data, in addition to organizing Loop components on a flexible canvas. Wangui McKelvey, Senior Director of Microsoft 365, clarified: “Pages are optimized for collective thinking and work done. They can start small and grow to match the size of your ideas and activities. The upcoming Microsoft Loop app will provide shared spaces, which means that teams can work simultaneously on different programs in the Loop component.

Loop components, pages and workspaces are entirely based on Microsoft's Fluid Framework open source platform, providing simultaneous collaboration across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The organization intends to share more insights about its new Microsoft Loop app soon, but the Loop component part is in preview for the Microsoft 365 app this month.

Why Microsoft launched Loop

The way people work has been largely fixed for a long time. Day-to-day work communication takes place primarily through email, with documents, spreadsheets and presentations as the main content creation form.

And in the past two years, the world has changed dramatically. After the epidemic became the norm, companies and organizations gradually adapted to the new work environment. People have also had to quickly embrace digitization, replacing traditional ways of working and communicating with other methods.

It can be seen that more enterprises have begun to focus on the development of digital commerce. And the company's newly recruited graduates may never even meet their leaders and colleagues in real life.

Electronic files have exploded, and digital files have expanded from traditional file types to a wider variety of formats and carriers. In order to author and run these new forms of content, more flexible and powerful work software is needed to ensure that everyone can collaborate at their own comfortable pace.

Microsoft Loop brings all Office software together in response to market demands, enabling users to move freely between apps and allowing team members to think, plan, and create together. Users can consolidate everything they need for a project, including files, links, and data from other apps, into the same workspace, and take advantage of portable components to easily get work done via chat, meeting, or document, keeping their work in sync at all times, making teamwork more efficient and closer than ever.