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Microsoft has begun showing off more of their upcoming integration of ‘Loop’, a direct competitor to apps like Notion and Coda.
This is the shift to a ‘hybrid’ model of work, where everything is integrated into a singular place, rather than being in dozens of separate apps or applets across the web.
For instance, Notion combines multiple types of Kanban boards (like Trello) for project management into a single program, as well as databases, tables, word processing, and embedding links for future use to create a workspace that is fluid and requires little reason to exit the ecosystem.
Microsoft has obviously seen this and developed Loop, which will be integrated into the entire Office suite, allowing users to quickly collate, collaborate and hop between programs without having to manually share things past setting a particular workspace board to share with their colleagues.
Loop is split into three components, all of which will be ‘live’, so you can see edits in real-time and presumably chat with your colleagues about any edits needed.
Loop components are the bits you can have shared between each program, like a piece of data from Excel to Teams or Word, which can then be edited and changed live as more data is entered.
Loop workspaces are the pages, while Loop pages act as the ‘hub’, where everything can be placed, pages embedded which can then link through to other pages or components.
Microsoft is taking the ‘new normal’ very seriously in their software development side of things since COVID and work from home have become more common. There’s also a definite sense of squashing the competition under their sheer might.
They’ve embedded Microsoft Teams, their competitor to Zoom, straight into Windows 11 and the company has also recently announced that they’ll be taking on Meta/Facebook in their virtual reality push.
As of right now, Loop has been in development and press tours for nearly two years, it arrives in One Note, Teams and Outlook later this month, but the actual core component of the program could launch sometime in 2022.