A new digital canvas app for Microsoft 365 addresses the rising visual collaboration trend.
Microsoft this week introduced Loop, a multifaceted digital canvas app that allows ideation and co-creation among teams within chats, virtual meetings, and documents as well as in shared workspaces.
Loop isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into visual collaboration for digital workers; Teams users can conduct collaborative sessions via a virtual whiteboard. However, Loop broadens the scope by allowing users to plunk collaborative components, like notes or task lists, into different Microsoft 365 workstreams. Any work done within a Loop component in one Microsoft 365 app flows to all other apps in the suite, so colleagues working together remain in sync.
Microsoft introduced this componentized approach for collaborating within workflows back in the summer, announcing agenda, notes, and task list components for Outlook, Teams, and OneNote built on Microsoft’s open-source Fluid Framework for development of collaborative applications. With this week’s announcement, Microsoft changes the name from Fluid to Loop components, adds voting table and status tracker offerings, and points to future components for workflows such as Dynamics 365. Down the road, app developers will be able to build their own Loop components, via the use of existing message extension apps and Microsoft Graph Connector integrations, Microsoft said.
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