Microsoft’s been on a roll when it comes to rolling out new features. There’s a brand-new one out there, called Loop, and it’s available for you to try out. Well, you and a bunch of the people you work with. Sorry, collaborate with.
Collaboration software isn’t anything new for Microsoft. The company’s been building those features into its Office stable for ages, with OneDrive holding the whole thing together. But Loop is supposed to unify everything so you don’t have to hop between programs. It’s like any number of other collaborative software suites, except that Microsoft made it. Also, there’s probably advanced AI headed in its direction in very short order.
Looping you in
Microsoft released a short demo video of its new collaborative software if you’d like to check it out before diving into the new public preview. The remarkable thing is just how much the software looks like Google’s vision of an AI-augmented Workspace product. Maybe that’s an animation style. Maybe it’s generative AI.
AI is definitely part of Microsoft’s new product, though it’s not taking much control out of your hands at first. An artificial intelligence will offer suggestions and starting points, like a Clippy that you don’t immediately want to strangle (we hope). Integrating the ability to comment and assign tasks with the option to drop different sections of the company’s software portfolio into the same project, we can see the potential for some serious work. Or some serious digital arguments, but that’s not very positive of us, is it?
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Microsoft Loop is currently available on the web, on Android, or iOS, if you’d like to see what it’s like to work in real-time with that team of yours that never seems to be doing anything. Perhaps the on-the-spot accountability will finally get Karen from HR to send through her contributions on time. Hey, we can dream, can’t we?
Just note, there are specific requirements for the mobile versions of Loop but anyone can give the web edition a shot immediately. The major question is whether it’s good enough to get users to bail on established apps like Slack or Asana but that’s the point of this public preview.