Microsoft has unveiled its own dedicated online collaboration tool geared towards project organization, assigning tasks, and sharing individual files.
In that respect, Microsoft Loop is very much in the tradition of tools such as Padlet and Asana, which offer shared workspaces to store ideas, files and to-do lists.
The announcement comes shortly after Microsoft unveiled plans to bring artificial intelligence to its office software suite with Microsoft 365 Copilot, a human-prompt driven tool designed to create content and serve as a central knowledge bank for things like meeting notes.
Microsoft Loop and Copilot
In Loop, Copilot will save a history of submitted prompts so they can be refined to produce better results, and allow generated work to be saved as a “component” (essentially a document) in a Loop workspace to be collaborated on or shared within other Microsoft 365 apps, such as Teams or Outlook.
It can also summarize the content of a page in Loop, in addition to that of documents shared in a workspace. Microsoft says that Copilot’s summarization features will arrive in Loop “in the next few months”, while Copilot in Loop itself is only in private preview.
Other than the AI capabilities involved, the only way Loop will set the world on fire is by being a tool integrated into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, which is, admittedly, in widespread use in organizations across the globe.
There’s a mobile application, a notification system, progress trackers, document templates, comments, and much more, but if your organization isn’t already chained to Microsoft 365, there’s little to set it apart from, say, Google Workspace, apart from a nicer interface.
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