Loop: An app too far? The pros and cons of Microsoft's new Loop app

the opinion I'm going to share in this video is going to be somewhat controversial I set out to make an updated video about Loop an app that I haven't really looked into a lot since I initially tried out the public preview last year but in getting a bit more time in the app starting to understand how it works under the hood I found that for everything it did that was exciting there was a tradeoff versus what I thought this new technology had promised I realize there are lots of fans of the loop app and there's lots of reasons to like it but I want to take some time in this video to separate the features of the loop app from Loop's underlying technology what it now seems to deliver versus what had notionally been promised hopefully by the end of this video even the most Ardent fans of loop will have some new things they are looking for as this exciting New Branch of Microsoft 365 continues to develop but before we dig in a quick introduction my name is Nick deori I'm the owner of bright ideas agency a digital transformation consulting company focused on the needs of smaller businesses I'm also the author of who's in the co-pilot seat a guide for Small Business Leaders on adopting AI I help businesses around the world get more from technology and if you're interested in working with me or getting a copy of my book there's more information and links in the video description so the loop app was released last year and if 2023 hadn't been Microsoft big year of AI then it probably would have got a lot more Buzz than it did it was the culmination of years of development by Microsoft that was originally announced back in 2019 as fluid framework the idea of fluid framework was broad but one key aspect was to break the productivity work product that exists in Microsoft 365 into living bite-sized chunks that could be surfaced anywhere across the suite essentially you take a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet and cut it down from a monolithic sheet of data into Lego style blogs you could then rearrange and reconfigure to build different outputs why might you want to do this well since the development of file formats like the doc or the improved and more flexible doc x Microsoft Office had moved to the cloud and had evolved into a platform Based On A Cloud first collaboration centered experience but office came with Decades of baggage that revolved around certain tasks being done in certain apps and as things expanded and changed there was more and more of this Legacy to keep on top of alongside the new instead of your experience of Microsoft 365 being task or project focused it was focused on switching between different apps for different types of work and a complicated mishmash of different types of files spread all over our corporate networks and the cloud as our Reliance on the digital rather the paper based increased our ability to keep track of our content was becoming a big problem according to 2019 research by information management company m files 83% of workers admitted to spending time recreating documents cuz they just couldn't find the ones they already knew existed we all got to a stage of drowning in stagnant poorly organized resources neither delivering value nor valueless enough to press the delete button this issue was further compounded by a drive to radically alter how we communicate and collaborate with platforms such as Microsoft teams coming to the for for some groups alongside a continued Reliance on older tools like outlook for others as new apps proliferated we didn't tend to come together behind better more modern technology we just became more spread across more and more apps split along almost tribalistic fault lines of believing the right place to work was one or two certain apps and trying to avoid using all the others at any cost overall we have ended up with a situation where we often don't know where content is whether it's up toate or where to communicate about it enter the componentization of Microsoft 365 before we move on to talk more about the fluid framework if you're finding this video useful it would be great if you'd give it a thumbs up to help you get in front of more interested people and if you want to see more like this please subscribe to the channel fluid components Microsoft's productization of its fluid framework idea were first conceived as a radical rethink of how content Works across Microsoft 365 instead of moving from Excel for your table of numbers to word for your notes about it to Outlook where you write the client an email concerning that work you have components connected with that topic that you could just surface anywhere do you have someone adding new data in that table but the person receiving it via email wants to see the latest numbers in the past achieving this output could involve repetitive and cumbersome busy work but with fluid framework components the table where the data is entered and the table shown in that email can be exactly the same not a copy but the same live data coming from the same live component which surfaces anywhere you need your documents your emails your messages could simply be built of these components with it no longer mattering where you worked with them if team a uses Outlook all the time and Team B is focused on teams collaboration it no longer matters as they can have the components they need where they want to work with them no more app switching no more context realignment just staying in your flow where you like to work getting your stuff done this was the promise of fluid framework and it seemed like this was a bright new future that would seamlessly merge the legacy of Microsoft Office without always connected collaboration first present and future and that all sounded great but if this was supposed to be a technology revolving around changing how content works in the core Microsoft 365 apps why now do we mainly talk about this in the context of a new Loop app in 2021 those fluid components were renamed to Loop and we started to see more fledgling Loop components spring up across Microsoft 365 and that Loop app got added into the mix this was slightly different to the framework itself which remains an open set of tools to allow other vendors to develop similar collaborative experiences in isolation I think there's lots of positives with the loop app it's easy to use and very intuitive and has quickly gained a lot of very interesting and high value features unlike some of the Legacy office apps it has really good co-pilot integration it's a very useful app and I know a lot of people have started to use it and I've seen tutorials for it springing up on YouTube and elsewhere it jumped out of public preview and became generally available in November last year it's essentially Microsoft competitor to popular productivity app notion those who are dedicated users of the loop app mostly seem to use it to undertake workloads we might have traditionally thought about as fitting in one note the structure of what you see in the loop app is not dissimilar to one note whereas in one note you have notebooks sections and pages in Loop you have workspaces pages and components users who have moved to the loop app speak highly of its range of creative templates and the ease of sharing content through those Loop components it's also designed for collaboration from the ground up unlike a tool like one node where it's there but somewhat tacked on now speaking of those components those Lego like content building blocks they have come to other Microsoft 365 apps too the fullest implementation of this is probably in teams or Outlook but we now also see Loop features in word and whiteboard there are third party extensions too and integration into one note has in the last few days been released into preview but not in time to be included in the examples shown in this video if you look at looping teams you get a really interesting picture of exactly how the loop Tech technology in the loop app can work alongside the Legacy Microsoft 365 apps in our simulated demo environment adell's account has created a new team's meeting and wants to share an agenda the new experience in teams creates a loop-based agenda meeting notes and task list I'm going to add something here but maybe Megan who is also added to this meeting wants to add something too jumping over to Megan's view she can seamlessly add here too but but what's more maybe she wants members of her team to know about this meeting with Adele and let them add items to the agenda too I'm going to copy this component and drop it into my Loop workspace with prad deep and Patty and now from prad Deep's view he can contribute an item that he wants me to discuss with Adele too but maybe I also know that Patty doesn't use Loop regularly but is always in teams I can simply copy the same component to my chat with Patty and if she wants to add something she can Adele Megan prad de and Patty are all referencing the same component kept updated in real time and can view and edit it where they want to work in this case A team's meeting in Loop or in team's chat no bouncing from screen to screen comparing documents we are all literally editing the same meeting notes block the fact is though that while this is very cool and in what I've shown you works really well there are a whole series of Fairly surprising limitations both in terms of usability and in the underlying architecture that leads me to conclude that what Luke promises is currently far from fully realized you might have noticed that Adele's meeting also had me as another participant let's jump over to my view of this meeting in a separate tenant and as you can see no agenda no notes this isn't a security policy or some setting on the meeting this is currently just how Loop works for anything you do in Loop there is no way to share externally and while I understand this functionality is coming at some point this seems a pretty big oversight for a tool that is focused on collaboration first as do many users of Microsoft support forums and elsewhere many of whom seem to have spent time setting up Loop assets only to learn later that unlike pretty much everything else in Microsoft 365 they are currently completely unshareable with anyone outside your organization the reality is though that in many ways Loop doesn't really build on Microsoft 365's existing collaboration pedigree and stand next to it completely distinct whether we think about SharePoint sites teams planner forms power app sharing or really 99% of collaboration opportunities in Microsoft 365 the foundational element to understand permissions and make them easy to manage is the Microsoft 365 group this has been built as a building block of your Microsoft 365 tenant where each group has a set of resources such as somewhere to save files SharePoint and somewhere to deal with messaging exchange that comes packaged with the group when it's created this is not always the easiest arrangement to understand or use but anyone with experience of managing resources in Microsoft 365 should have good familiarity with this Arrangement Loop breaks this the app relies upon workspaces that are created entirely outside the context of a Microsoft 365 group but depending on whether we are talking about resources that live exclusively inside the loop app or Loop components created from there or other apps how Loop deals with storage is a mixture of conventions we are familiar with and ones we are not Loop the app relies upon the new SharePoint embedded technology that is essentially a UI free version of SharePoint whereas Loop components rely heavily on one drive even in collaborative scenarios although this is changing with Loop components now coming to teams channels where the noral storage Arrangements in teams will operate the components themselves are stored as Loop files which are surprisingly intolerant to being moved around from say one drive to SharePoint meaning that a little spring cleaning of your storage could inadvertently break things others are using all the baggage of one drive being a bad place to drive long-term collaboration from has been ignored by Microsoft in developing Loop in fact go create a loop component in a word file stored in SharePoint the Associated Loop file will appear in your one drive it's all a little bit of a head scratcher alongside this the experience of Loop in those Legacy Microsoft 365 apps couldn't be described as in parity with the loop app itself depending on where you're working the experience is different but if you want all the bells and whistles Loop has to offer you have to start from the loop app and you'll be limited in your desire if you're creating components from word for example in the May 6th 2019 blog posts that coincided with the announcement of fluid framework at build Microsoft made three commitments about the intention of this technology the second was and I quote it provides a componentized document model that allows authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks use them across applications and combine them in a new more flexible kind of document end quote this went alongside highquality co-authoring and the ability to integrate intelligent agents to completely redefine how content is built across Microsoft 365 it seems to me that somewhere along the line the team working on Loop got distracted from this initial intent and instead of modernizing the document models that already existed in Microsoft 365 they decided to create a new app and a new document model to compete with a different service instead the target was very clearly notion again there's nothing wrong with the loop app as such but the loop experience across Microsoft 365 as currently delivered does in no way in my opinion live up to the promise or potential of the fluid framework as outlined nearly 5 years ago you might say well it'll probably get there in the end and that might be true but if the intent is to make what Microsoft 365 already does better and easier why not focus on that first and add the completely new experiences later the way around this has been delivered a small subset of users might love Loop and move much of their work there but a good number will probably look at it and shrug their shoulders and then getting them to embrace anything under that Loop name later on will be much much harder we've seen this before we have to remember that it was a global pandemic that transformed teams from a take it or leave it also ran part of Microsoft 365 to the bayouth we see today I'm not saying that teams would have disappeared without that jolt of G growth but it certainly got a lot of people who had previously dismissed teams to look again I was part of just such an organization at that time and I feel confident in suggesting that many of the hundreds of millions of current team's users were in a similar boat some sort of management interface for all your Loop components is of course necessary but a completely new office app where much of your work can get done that was in my opinion a misstep I see people sharing content on how for example to replace one one note with Loop and I understand that some might want to do that but that was not the original intent of this redesign across Microsoft 365 from what I can tell and it simply won't be possible to get all users on that Journey consequently leading to more complexity not less in the age of AI this concept of componentization is not going away I've talked here before about how bite-sized chunks of somewhat structured data that is more easily understood by Microsoft's indexing technology is probably a vital Foundation to the continued increasing efficacy of tools like co-pilot for Microsoft 365 if for this reason alone the drive to build more content across Microsoft 365 from those Loop building blocks will increase however we have to have experiences in all the apps that are on parity with one another and usefully check off most of the existing collaboration needs now talking of AI has your business settled on an approach to inte integrating AI into your digital transformation plans do you even have a digital transformation plan technology is evolving all around us and one of the ways you can differentiate your business from others not just in what you provide for customers but also the environment you offer to your team members is how you embrace the technology opportunities that are coming up my one-on-one virtual digital transformation coaching service is designed to help you find the right path with technology sometimes what you're looking for is support and guidance rather than a long-term project or a hard sell on a particular product here I can help if you like the approach I take in my videos then you can get it applied to your own needs and use cases to get you pointed in the right direction check out the links below for more information there are real challenges in how the document models and sharing across Microsoft 365 work that turns people onto Solutions like notion and the decision to focus on building something that competes with that rather than fixing the leak roof across all the rest of the suite feels wrong to me fairly foundational capabilities like Loop components providing a seamless sharing experience to anyone who could have ordinarily received the content component is part of what is just missing right now for a product in early preview that's fine but for General release that's a no from me so should you use Loop either the components or the app I still think this is a vital technology for the future of Microsoft 365 but depending on your need this is not necessarily something to jump into yet Microsoft 365 is a big Suite of tools and while you get a lot of people like me talking up every new Advance the right path for most users is to focus on maximizing the returns for those tools that are likely to deliver most value Microsoft 365 apps are not Pokémon you don't need to catch them all from researching for this video what does seem clear is that certainly a sizable number of users have started to use Loop and then running into challenges with some of the feature limitations I've highlighted here this is one of the reasons I decided to make this video rather than just coming back to this topic later it's always important to spend some time ensuring a new tool meets your needs before you plow a lot of effort into moving your work to it through 2023 we saw what Microsoft can do when they put their Collective efforts into something we shouldn't ignore the fact that Loop has been in the making since 2019 but co-pilot for Microsoft 365 which wasn't announced until March 2023 is already available in more apps than Loop components are the loop technology really interests me so I'll continue to stay on top of Loop and how it develops I might even start to use the app for some things but I'm certainly more interested in the long-term changes the loop capabilities will bring to the core of Microsoft 365 word has been around for 30 years it's not going anywhere because there's now a loop app so the the future of this platform is down to how well Innovation like this can be woven into that Legacy and this is the tension that exists with every new step forward Microsoft takes not just in Loop but across its products what do you think are you a loop fan and have I convinced you to think about it differently or are you someone who is uninterested in Loop and like me wish it have been developed with different priorities let me know down in the comments thanks for watching through to the end until the next video keep loopy and bye-bye

Channel: Bright Ideas Agency

Views: 28,815

Keywords: microsoft 365, microsoft loop, microsoft loop app, microsoft loop review, microsoft loop teams, microsoft loop components, loop app, microsoft loop component, how to use microsoft loop, microsoft loop demo, fluid framework, copilot for microsoft 365, microsoft teams, personal productivity apps, personal productivity, office 365, microsoft 365 review, microsoft loop tips, microsoft loop meeting agenda, new loop app, notion

Id: -MzKCx5A_GI

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024