Microsoft’s Game-Changer: NEW Loop Feature to Challenge Notion!

Microsoft Loop is the next best thing since well note taking and productivity app notion this week in it I look at how Microsoft is planning to challenge notion and how current features are building towards a big update that customers have requested stay tuned to find out the latest welcome to this week in it the show where I talk about everything connected to Azure Microsoft 365 and windows but before I get started today I've got a quick favor to ask you about 57% of the people who watched last week's video weren't subscribed to the channel now as we go live today we're on about 3,940 subscribers so I'd really love it if we could push that up to 4,000 this week so if you want to help us meet our goal then subscribe to the channel and don't forget to hit the Bell notification to make sure that you don't miss out on the latest uploads so if you haven't come across notion before it's a notetaking am productivity app on steroids and it's been a trend Setter in the remote work and collaboration space over the last four or five years there are many small businesses and startups that run their entire businesses on notion and there's a huge ecosystem built around it especially the template market now Microsoft Loop has a very similar look and filter notion and it's clearly Microsoft's answer to notion because they had to do something to attract all of these small businesses and smbs that are really into notion and would prefer to use it it was released in preview in November 2021 based on the fluid framework and it became generally available last year now if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription it might seem like a no-brainer to use Loop and it may well be and loop and notion obviously Loop is still in its infancy as a product notion is already a mature product but Microsoft has done pretty well at building out Loop but there are still pros and cons to both of these Solutions but one of the disadvantages of loop at this stage is that it doesn't have a database feature and that's one of the capabilities of notion that makes it such a powerful solution now notion implements what is essentially a lightweight database feature and part of tables and loop also has tables but they're not a database as they stand today and databases can be embedded into a loop page from other applications but it's not the same as having a native database functionality on the latest episode of unplug it Daryl Webster interviewed Rebecca Keys who's a program manager on the Microsoft Loop team and as part of that interview she revealed that Microsoft is working on adding database functionality to Loop now I don't believe Microsoft has publicly said that anywhere before and I spoke to Daryl a little bit about it during the week and he said one of the problems is that like most other products in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem there's no road map for Loop and apparently MVPs have been asking for that so hopefully it's something that Microsoft will Implement in the future for Loop so that we can see what features are being worked on but in my mind this is really big news if Loop gets that database functionality that notion has then this is going to be a real game Cher for Microsoft now it's interesting what Microsoft is currently doing with tables in Loop because you can see that they're gradually starting to build out what will eventually be part of the database functionality so you can see on my screen here that I've got the show notes for this episode and I format everything in a table uh we do this together with our news director Rabia so we collaborate on this document now the filter function is something that's been added very recently to tables and if you have a look at the table here the icons across the top you see we've got a new one called filter now if I click on that I can add one or more rules to determine what I'm going to be shown in this table and here I can add uh one or more conditions to determine what I see in the table so for instance I could select the notes column I select a condition here so if it contains a particular piece of text here I had to remind myself that I should credit darl for this news and you can see here this is the row where Daryl is mentioned in the text and I can go back and add another filter if I want uh make this as simple or as complicated as I like and just clear all there so that's a really useful new feature for filtering what you can see in a table especially if you've got very large tables of course now another interesting thing which I stumbled across recently and I don't know whether this has been there from the beginning or if it's something new they added I suspect it's been added at some point is that you can go into uh any column in a particular row right click and you've got the option to open detailed view now you can actually edit this information in this row here just like you might do in a database and I've been using this a bit recently actually and it looks very very similar to what you see in notion of course so in my mind this is another step that Microsoft is taken to build out the database functionality in tables in Loop and filtering functionality also works with sync components like task lists or third-party Integrations such as GitHub Trello and jira now if you've been following this channel for for some time you probably know that I'm a big loop fan and you know I occasionally go back to using one note because I have some Legacy things in one note and I still add to those notebooks but what really you know reminds me about how Dreadful one note can be is the synchronization story you don't have all of this kind of instant collaborative uh technology like you have in Loop and the ability to share components and synchronization in Microsoft One Note to be honest is just broken and I would say that after teams Loop is the second most used application in Microsoft 365 for me personally it's just the go-to place now where I need to take notes if I need to collaborate on anything with somebody unless it's something very specific that needs to go in a Word document or in an Excel spreadsheet for instance Loop is always the star in place for that kind of work now of course database functionality would seriously change the game for loop I think in comparison to notion of course especially but it's not the only thing that's missing from Loop but what with the power automate integration the filtering abilities and the upcoming database functionality this is all really starting to come together as a very powerful solution in my mind the only thing that's really stopping loop from taking over the world if you like is the lack of an Open Marketplace for workspaces of course there's a big ecosystem built around notion you can go out onto YouTube you'll find lots of people talking about specific templates for workspaces that they've set up and you might may think that's not really a big issue but it is a big issue because these notion workspaces they represent entire processes and systems that people are set up to run their businesses and people Market these templates they sell these templates they give them away for free and that's part of the attraction of notion is that it's you know easy to import particular systems and workspaces through this template system now Loop does have templates at the moment but it's restricted in a couple of ways so templates only apply to individual Pages rather than an entire workspace and it's a closed you know Market if you like it's only templates that Microsoft is offering are no third-party templates available or can be added at this stage but if Microsoft can change that to make it you know a workplace template and an Open Marketplace then I think there's really no stopping loop from being a major Challenger to notion what do you think about these changes that Microsoft is planning to make to Loop do you think they go far enough to challenge notion or do you think that Loop doesn't really stand a chance let me know what you think in the coms comments below if you found this video useful I'd really appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up because that helps to get the video seen by more people on YouTube but before I leave today I'm going to leave another video on the screen about Windows 10 extended security updates and the pricing for those that Microsoft announced recently but that's it for me today and I'll see you next time sh

Channel: This Week in IT

Views: 103,103

Keywords: m365, msloop

Id: zORNRS1Norg

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024