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Connect Your Hybrid Team with Microsoft Loop
Introducing Microsoft Loop, a powerful new app for Microsoft 365 that brings together workspaces and teams, allowing team members to collaborate freely in a way that can help employees feel more connected and productive than ever before.
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Originally announced back in November 2021 at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft has begun the roll-out of Microsoft Loop. The Microsoft Loop app offers users a new co-creation experience, bringing together content, tasks, and teams across a user’s tools and devices. The app includes a flexible canvas and portable components, that can be moved and reorganised as the user sees fit.
Microsoft Loop is made up of three elements, Loop Components, Loop Pages and Loop Workspaces.
Loop Components
Fluid pieces of content, Loop Components can be moved freely while still staying in sync across all the locations where they have been previously shared. Components empower users to collaborate with colleagues while in the flow of work, whether it be in a chat, email, document, or a Loop page. Components can be things like lists, tables, and much more. Components are always pulling the latest information from the users' preferred app – Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Teams for example. Some other notable components available are business-specific elements like Dynamics 365 records to help facilitate workflows, voting tables that help working teams generate ideas and make decisions, and a status tracker to help gather progress information from the team.
Loop Pages
Pages are the flexible canvases in the Loop app where you can place all your Loop components and other helpful elements like links, data, or files, bringing together colleagues, tasks and data in one space. Working teams can collaborate on projects in real time with options to leave comments and reactions on Loop pages. Loop pages can be as long as required and be easily shared across other Microsoft 365 apps or they can be embedded as a Loop component.
Loop Workspaces
Workspaces are shared collaborative spaces within the Loop app that allow working teams to group everything important together for particular projects or programmes. These spaces are easily accessible and make it easier for everyone to catch up on all content related to one project, understand what everyone on the team is working on, and progress toward a shared objective.
For a quick overview of Microsoft Loop, watch the video below.
Today’s modern workplace and ways of working are still evolving, particularly when it comes to communication and collaboration. In a recent survey of Irish IT Leaders commissioned by Storm Technology, Tech Central and Microsoft, the top barriers to collaboration when it comes to hybrid and remote working were lack of digital skills (48%), people having time to collaborate (45%), lack of face-to-face meetings (44%) and virtual meeting fatigue (43%). With online and hybrid communications commonplace for many organisations, there was a need for more flexible channels and new formats for workplace communication to help address challenges such as these.
This is where Loop can help, expanding the original Microsoft 365 collaboration spaces to deliver a universal canvas that can help all kinds of creators better manage their workspace communications. Microsoft is continually working on releasing new functionality to support hybrid working, ensuring its Microsoft 365 solution stack is evolving in line with the new ways of working and in line with the needs of employees, while helping offer businesses more value from the applications they already use day-to-day.
If you would like to learn more about how Microsoft 365 can help support your organisation's modern workplace, get in touch to speak to a specialist.
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