Microsoft launching Loop, focused on remote & collaborative work

Microsoft is launching Loop, a new app in its Office Suite that's meant to streamline project collaboration in the era of remote and hybrid work.

The Microsoft Loop app is essentially a rebranding of the company's work on Fluid, which is a way to create content that can be independently copied, pasted, and shared with others.

Microsoft showed off the new Loop functionality at its online-only Ignite conference on Tuesday.

Loop components, for example, are blocks of content that can exist across multiple apps, and which users can update in real time. Loop pages are similar, but are more like individual canvases that include Loop components. Loop Workspaces provide a broad overview of shared projects.

Microsoft's corporate vice president Jared Spataro characterized the Loop initiative as a way of "blowing up the document."

The effort also comes ahead of rising Microsoft 365 prices in 2022. It's likely that the company is looking to provide more value for customers who subscribe to its services.

Microsoft says that Loop components will arrive in its Teams, Outlook, and OneNote app later in November. The main Loop app will be released "at a later date," with the company sharing availability information in the coming months.

19 Comments

mcdave 1927 comments · 19 Years

About 3 years ago

As long as it’s not the mess that Teams was on first release. Microsoft really have no clue about coherent design, their products fumble along conflicting with each other ultimately requiring a PowerShell consultant to configure them to do anything useful.

epicurus13 11 comments · 4 Years

It’d be really amazing if Microsoft would pull their heads out of their asses and update their email clients with browser rendering engines rather then still using Word as a rendering engine for html email!!!

22july2013 3725 comments · 11 Years

What is Apple's closest competing product? iCloud?

elijahg 2823 comments · 18 Years

22july2013 said:

What is Apple's closest competing product? iCloud?

iWork has an online aspect, that's probably closest. But unfortunately Apple's insistence that iWork has feature parity across web/iOS/iPadOS/macOS means it's hobbled to the lowest common denominator. It's only really now begun to reach the same level of power it had before they crippled it to work on iOS back in about 2012. Meanwhile Office has continued to expand its collaboration and automation tools.

I have used Pages extensively, and whist documents created in it look 20x better than they do in Word, the development priority seems to be form over capability (much like Apple's hardware), and therefore it misses so many powerful writing features that're needed for more than just a school newsletter. Until about 6 months ago for example, it didn't even have a way to caption images, much less create an index of figures. I have previously posted here a long list of issues I encountered while writing my dissertation, I was close to abandoning it at one point and switching to Word but I persevered. Knowing its shortcomings now though, I wouldn't even consider writing a complex document in Pages. There's just so much that Word does automatically that is manual in Pages.