Looping back In

It has been almost a year since we checked in on Loop, the new application from Microsoft that allowed real time collaboration in many asynchronous apps, such as email, or task tracking. In those months, Loop has matured greatly, moving from a product on the periphery of most folks knowledge, to one that is integrated into meetings, connected into Teams and increasingly effective at changing behavior in a positive feedback loop. (Pun intended.)

As I explained earlier, Loop components can be easily embedded into an email. How to do so? Just click the loop button and add the component:

Once you've chosen an item, such as "Task list" - it will appear in the email, but more importantly, be updatable real-time. So far - nothing that looks unusual for folks:

Let's leave this here for a second and turn to another place to get started with Loop - in setting up a meeting. Rather than use Outlook - I'm going to build a meeting in Teams - which looks very similar today except for one key difference near the bottom of the screen. I'm referring to "Add an agenda".

The best part of this experience is that, so far, nothing says "LOOP" in big letters. Yet just try to build the agenda (you're a great meeting organizer, after all!) and watch what happens.

Just by clicking the link, a Loop is automatically created, with three sections, "Agenda", "Meeting notes" and "Follow-up tasks". By guiding a meeting organizer, and not even mentioning Loop, Microsoft has instituted a best practice into every Teams meeting easily.

So far so good - you've got realtime collaborative pieces now in the meetings you are running. Yet Loop does one more item - each of these components that include "tasks", because they are cloud native, now can be synchronized across the entire organization.

How? There are three ways to check:

• Using Microsoft Outlook - just click the "To-Do/Tasks" icon
• Using Microsoft To-Do app - just look at "Assigned to Me"
• Using Microsoft Teams - load up the "Tasks by Planner and To Do" app

Each one of these interfaces will show you the exact same set of tasks assigned to you, encompassing tasks that were assigned in a full project management tool, such as Planner, or simply were setup as tasks in a meeting, or even as one-off tasks sent via email or stand-alone. You can also see in each program, the "source" of where the task came from, and if you dedicate time to doing so, you can avoid dropping the ball on any commitments you've made.

This task tracking seems simple - but it is a great way to start using Loop on a small team, and to drive better meeting behavior, without asking folks to start using completely different website + applications. This way folks can continue to use Outlook + Teams, just with better results, thanks to Loop.

In the Teams meeting itself, the "Agenda" automatically turns into the "Notes" - which also allow meeting participants to quickly take steps to perform best-practices.

And of course, for those organizations that are already using Copilot for Microsoft 365 - you can simply ask Copilot to summarize a meeting, or gather a list of action items, and then paste those into the Follow-up tasks field to reduce the total amount of meeting make-work to near zero.

That's a huge time-saver - and one that every team will appreciate, regardless of the technology underpinning it. We're using this today at Cognizant - and it has been the primary driver of satisfaction with Copilot - and evangelism around Loop. That's not all there is to Loop of course - but we'll save the more advanced scenarios for a future update!