New Microsoft Loop app for modern co-creation

[Guest Zachary Cavanell]

Bring together teams, content, and tasks across your tools and devices with the new Microsoft Loop app, available both on the web and in mobile. It gives you a central place to create real-time content in a simple, collaborative and structured way, from using intelligent search to build your first shared workspaces, where you can enjoy super-fast synchronized collaboration, to leveraging AI with Copilot in Loop, to generate ideas with others on your team. Copilot capabilities in Loop will begin rolling out in the next few months.

 

 

 

 

If you’re using Loop components today, you might familiar with how you can embed live, auto-updating content seamlessly across apps like Microsoft Teams, Outlook email, Word and even the Whiteboard — all from the same source, freeing you up to work in your preferred collaboration modality. The Loop app builds on this and gives you a new hub to create and find all of your shared Loop components, workspaces, and pages.

 

 

 

Join Derek Liddell, Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Loop, as he shares how to install, navigate, and start using the Microsoft Loop app.

 

 

Embed live, auto-updated content across Teams, Outlook and Word.

 

 

 

 

 

Co-author and create from within your app of choice.

 

 

 

Make live edits on Microsoft Loop components as a team — on separate devices and apps.

 

 

Create, Brainstorm, Blueprint, and Describe.

 

 

 

Generate a starting point for team collaboration.

 

 

Watch our video here.

 

 

 

QUICK LINKS:

 

 

 — What is Microsoft Loop?

 

 — Loop components in Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Word

 

 — The new Microsoft Loop app

 

 — Getting started with Loop

 

 — Working with others in their preferred apps

 

 — Using AI with Copilot to generate and refine content

 

 — Notifications, getting back to your Loop components, and ideas

 

 — Wrap up

 

 

Link References:

 

 

Start using Loop at Microsoft Loop - Think, plan and create together

 

 

 

Get the mobile app at Winding down in style

 

 

 

Admin steps to enable at Manage Loop experiences (Loop app and Loop components) in SharePoint - SharePoint in Microsoft 365

 

 

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Video Transcript:

 

 

-Up next, we look at the new Microsoft Loop app. I’ll show how it gives you a central place to bring people together to create real-time content in a simple, collaborative and structured way, from using intelligent search to build your first shared workspaces, where you can enjoy super-fast synchronized collaboration, to leveraging AI with Copilot in Loop, to generate ideas with others on your team to get in your flow.

 

 

 

-Now if you are using Loop components today, you’ll be familiar with how you can embed live, auto-updating content seamlessly across apps like Microsoft Teams, Outlook email and Word all from the same source, freeing you up to work in your preferred collaboration modality, even if you take a break from working on the content as others on your team work asynchronously. Whenever you return to the component, as you can see here where I’ve chosen to work in Outlook, the content is always fresh, it’s live and always up to date. This avoids wasted time from linking out to other apps, jumping in and out of experiences, giving you a more fluid way to work.

 

 

 

-In fact, under the covers, the experience is all made possible by Microsoft’s Fluid Framework, making the experience connected and interactive across your favorite apps so you can work from wherever you want to, including the new Microsoft Loop app, in real-time and at scale.

 

 

 

-And speaking of the new Loop app, co-creation with others gets even better. Not only does it give you a way to view and organize all your Loop activity, it’s also a full experience itself, as a new collaborative canvas. First, let me walk you through how to get started. You can find the app at loop.microsoft.com. Or you can install the Loop mobile app on your iOS or Android device, following the directions where the QR code on screen links you. From there, you can use your work or school account, or a personal Microsoft account to sign in. And if you connect your Microsoft account to it, this also works using Gmail. In this case, we’ll use a work or school account, which is tied to my organization.

 

 

 

-To get started, you’ll create a new workspace by clicking the plus sign. This is a shared space where you can collaborate with your team. You just need to give it a name, I’ll call mine Contoso Mark 8. The intelligence powering this has offered up related content that I have access to. I can optionally add key words for even more content, but what I see here already looks good, so I’ll select these two PowerPoint presentations. I can also choose to invite the team now, but in this case, I’ll do that once I’m a little further along on the content. And now I just need to hit Create.

 

 

 

-Within each workspace are pages, you can see that based on my content selection, Loop has already added a few links generated from the content I chose before, so I’m up and running fast. And within this untitled page, you can make it your own by adding a cover image, an icon, a name for the page and then your content you want. I’ll leave these blank for now. Because, to get started quickly, you can use page templates for the most common page types, as you’ll see here for a Project Brief, Team Decision, Project Home, Meeting Notes and you’ll see us add even more templates over time. I’ll choose Team Decision as a good template for brainstorming, and you’ll see it added the name and emoji, plus some areas for stakeholders, questions, background context, constraints, assumptions, ideas and next steps.

 

 

 

-So as you saw, this gives you a great starting point to fill in your own personalized content based on what you are working on. And in a moment, I’ll even show how this process gets better with AI using Copilot. Let’s move forward in time, where I’ve been adding structure and ideas for brainstorming before I share this with my team. Once I’m ready to share this page or workspace with my team, I just need to hit the share button above and choose the option I want. I can share the whole workspace, so that the team can work on everything in the workspace together, or I can choose an individual page, which is great for pinpointing access or I can share this as a Loop component, so that I can embed it into other apps, which I’ll show you in a moment. First, I’ll choose the workspace option and add Adele, Megan, Patti, and Alex. And once I hit Invite, they’ll receive a notification and get access to this entire Loop workspace.

 

 

 

-Now let’s go back into the sharing menu and go a bit deeper on that Loop component option. It will create a sharing link, where you can control who can access it in your organization. Now from there, you can send people the link to get to this page in the workspace, but what’s even more powerful is sharing this as a live Loop component. This is something you can do now with a work or school account within your organization and will come later to personal Microsoft accounts.

 

 

 

-Next, I’ll head over to Microsoft Teams, and use the link I created and paste it into a team chat. You’ll see all of the content that was sent is editable here for my team members. And I can do things like add this as a Loop component to a Word document and share that to people outside of my project team. You can add it to an Outlook email message directly, so that recipients can edit it right from their inbox, without even needing to hit reply.

 

 

 

-Now let me show you what happens when we all start working together on this component. What you’re seeing right now are the screens from four different members on the team, including me, all on separate devices using four different apps. Adele is using our Loop app in dark mode, I’m in Microsoft Teams, Patti is using Word, and Megan is in Outlook. Everyone is simultaneously making live edits against my Loop component. Here we’re all nominating our favorite influencers to help promote our new Mark 8 quadcopter. Alex, on the Loop mobile app that you’re seeing now is also contributing directly to this page. And you’ll see it’s really easy to quickly add photos and interact with the content. And as each person makes an edit, everyone else on their device and using their app of choice sees the edit instantly.

 

 

 

-So, as you saw, with Microsoft Loop, you and your team can co-author and create from within your app of choice. So, you don’t have to navigate to another app that only provides a single view of your project content. Now that you’ve seen how Loop works for collaboration, let me walk through the controls you’ll use and AI-integrated capabilities that can help you create content faster. Back in the Loop home experience, some time has passed and I can see all of the workspaces I’ve been working on, along with some favorites and you’ll notice that with the presence indicator, I can see that Megan is already in the Contoso Mark 8 workspace. I’ll open up that workspace again to join Megan, and hit the plus sign on the left. Here I can add a new page or a link. I’ll choose a page. Next, I’ll give it a name. In this case, I’ll just add an icon without a cover image. And here, I can type or insert content using a forward slash and you’ll see all of the formatting options that I’ll show in a second.

 

 

 

-But now, I want to show how AI can help you get started and in your flow quickly, so I’ll select Copilot. That gives me a few options to generate a starting point or pick a starter prompt and these buttons give you samples for prompts to Create, Brainstorm, Blueprint, or Describe what you want. In my case, I want to get started describing our Mark 8 quadcopter, so I’ll type “describe the best way to highlight ease of use when operating a quadcopter” and it generates a nice list of items based on the public information it knows about quadcopters. And I can see Megan is also in this page, and the great thing about Loop is that you can work with others on your team to refine the prompts together in real-time. Megan has just added a prompt to change the tone and format of the text that we generated to sound more like it would to describe our quadcopter to a customer. But I think we can simplify it a little more and format this back into a bulleted list. And now we’ve got a nice starting point.

 

 

 

-Next, I can use the @ symbol to notify the best person on our team, Adele, to match these bullets to the Mark 8’s qualities I have a few more ideas for using Copilot, but first let me show you a few of the simple formatting controls in the Loop app. I’ll paste in some text I’ve been working on to describe the Mark 8’s audio features. And once I select this text, it brings up a menu to easily make it a heading. Now I’ll select this section here, and right click to change its format to a bulleted list. But still, I think we can do better, because the list of audio features sounds pretty technical with lots of specialized terms.

 

 

 

-So let’s use Copilot to help make our audio description easier to understand. I’ll go back to Copilot. Now I’ll type “simplify this text description so that anyone can understand it” and the text is still in my clipboard, so I’ll paste it in. And Copilot has generated a much simpler summary of the audio capabilities; it’s descriptive, but all of the jargon is gone. So now, it’s looking pretty close, but I want more feedback, so I’ll use this comment icon, where I can easily add an emoji or a text-based comment. And I’ll go ahead and ask Megan what she thinks. In fact, commenting is a great way to collaborate with others without overwriting someone else’s work. And by the way, if your content is somehow deleted or overwritten by someone else, Version History is also available to restore to a previous version.

 

 

 

-And while you’re in the workspace, let me point out a few more things that let you easily navigate to what you’ve been working on. Built-in notifications help you stay on top of everything and the changes that you need to know about right from here. Also, if you’re looking for Loop components that you have access to, whether they were created by you or someone else, they’re here under “Recent”, where you’ll see their details. And while I walked you through the steps to create workspaces and pages, the Loop app is also great for capturing your ideas. When you have an idea, you can easily create a standalone Loop page. In fact, you can see a few here that I’ve started. This is very useful to structure your thoughts before you share your ideas or add them to a workspace later, allowing others to join in, so that you can watch your ideas build and grow.

 

 

 

-That was a quick tour of the Microsoft Loop App, now in preview. It’s the newest co-creation app for real-time, synchronized collaboration across your favorite app experiences and devices. Try it out now at loop.microsoft.com. If you don’t see this enabled for your work account, it will need to be enabled in the admin center. And if you haven’t already, start using Loop components in Microsoft Teams chat, Outlook, Word for the web as well as the Whiteboard. There’s more in store, too, so make sure you “stay in the loop” on future updates on Microsoft Mechanics. Thanks for watching!

 

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