Darrell Webster speaks to Rebecca Keys, a Program Manager from the Microsoft Loop team. Including the latest and greatest that’s arrived in Microsoft Loop.
Transcript
Hey, this is Darrell Webster for UnplugIT. I had the privilege of being able to go to Microsoft Redmond and for the Microsoft MVP Summit. And there I met with Rebecca Keys, a Program Manager from the Microsoft Loop team. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to be able to talk about the latest and greatest that’s arrived in Microsoft Loop. And so we did this, we talked through some of the developments, some of the current or new features and things that are coming soon too. So stay tuned for more.
Hey everyone, I’m Darrell Webster and I’m here with Rebecca Keys at Microsoft headquarters. And Rebecca Keys is from the Microsoft Loop team. And Rebecca, just tell a little bit yourself and what you do for the team. Yeah, I’m a product manager on the Loop team. So a lot of the things that I focus on is growth,(…) Loop launched about a year ago. And so from then until now, we’ve really been focusing on growth and building the features that our customers want.
And I’ve been on the Loop team for about two years. So since early on in the product. Oh yeah, the magical two years, remember people when it was announced and there was some beautiful videos. You saw the videos in creation, yeah.
It’s part of what we’re talking about today, people, because it took two years to get to general availability, didn’t it? What was that journey like? Yeah, a lot of it is, we have this product that we think is good, but when do we know it’s good enough?
So we, as the product team are using the product every day, we think like, oh, this is terrible. Like people are never gonna be able to use this. But as we started testing with users, we found out, like eventually, we got to release this to the world. And so it was really finding that balance of good quality and speed
and really just testing and testing and testing to find bugs, figure out what we needed to fix, and then eventually launching it, which was a very exciting moment on the team. Yeah, I was honored to be part of the private preview with a partner and that was a good experience too. I think it was valuable feedback, I think in the context of real work. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure having you be a part of the private preview.
So yeah, it took two years to come to GA and it feels like since then, there’s been quite a release path of all sorts of things that have been appearing in Loop. So we’re gonna talk through a few of these things that we’ve seen, some of the features, some of the ideas that we start to see and maybe how things are landing with customers. Rebecca, feel free to show us a few things. Yeah, sure.(…) One of the things that I think was very much requested from customers, kind of since we came out with Loop, was code blocks.
So the reason I mentioned that is because we have a lot of forums where we’re gathering feedback.
When you click on the feedback button in Loop, there’s this option to give feedback and then you can either compliment, problem, or make a suggestion.(…) Right here on make a suggestion, we had so many people ask for code blocks and one of the ways that we actually prioritize what we’re building in Loop is by looking at the suggestions that people make and then trying to respond to some of those top requests.(…) And so one of the things that we knew from kind of launch was that we really wanted to add code blocks for developers that found a lot of value in Loop. So now if you click on that slash and you click on code, you have a code block here. We have lots of different languages you can choose from.
And if you end up using something like Check GPT to develop code, you can also use Copilot to build into Loop. – Oh, to bring it in. – Yeah, so one of the things we’ve been focused on a lot lately is Copilot in Loop. If you say draft some page content and you have a Copilot license, you can ask Copilot, for example, to build a webpage header for you. You can ask which language you want it coded in and then it can actually output it for you in a code block like this. – Wow. – Lots of top requested features and lots of focus on Copilot as you can imagine. – Yeah, yeah.
And Copilot is, I would say, a unique experience to in Loop, isn’t it? Because we see Copilot in products like Word or Outlook or Teams and it’s very much a single person experience. I’m asking Copilot, can you tell me about this meeting? Or can you start me off with a paragraph for an article? But in Loop, it’s a different experience. So what’s different here when we start to use Loop together? – Yeah, one of the things that we use to describe Copilot in Loop is it’s you plus your teammates plus Copilot. – Right. – So I can, for example, ask Copilot, let’s just go back to that generating code example. I can ask Copilot to generate some code and maybe I’m working either synchronously in a meeting or async with a teammate and they need to update that request. They can actually go in and modify the prompt that I already asked Copilot to do and we’re both working with Copilot as kind of our third teammate.(…) And that’s an experience that’s just really valuable when you’re focused on collaboration, which is a huge value prop in Loop. So something we really wanted to get right.
– Yeah, yeah, I think one thing that also impresses me in that experience is that it really does feel like you are co-authoring. I know that we can’t demonstrate this now because I’m not in Rebecca’s environment. But I’ll share some videos, you’ll see them in B-roll. (laughing) But the great way of being able to refine the prompt and so you might start with something and I might add something to it becomes that conversation together and then we come out with that finished product which we can enrich as well. – Yeah, absolutely. I think people have found it really valuable and we’re excited to hear more feedback to see what other things would be helpful for folks.
– Is there any other way that Copilot and AI is also helping teams to use Loop and to work together? – Yeah, so we talked about that like you plus your teammate plus Copilot scenario. Another big scenario that we know is difficult for people to do quickly is to catch up on changes.(…) And when you have a busy day and you’ve missed some meetings or your team has been working in a workspace that you’re then catching up on, you need a quick way to understand what has happened.(…) And so one of the things that we’re thinking about with Copilot is how can you recap the changes that have been made? So I’ll give an example. Let’s say my team has been working on, I’ll give prepping for a conference as an example since we’re at a conference right now.
Let’s say my teammate Jessica has made a bunch of changes to our plan for the conference and she wants to let me know how those changes have been made. She can go in to the right hand side of Loop, click on the three dots, say recap my changes. – Like this?(…) – Yeah, let’s just try it out now. – This is the recap button. – There we go, recap our changes.(…) And then if I’ve made some changes to the page, right now I have not made any changes, but if I did, we could click on Create a new recap and it will essentially just summarize everything that I changed. And then I can, let’s just say, at mention Jessica and say, hey, I made these changes.
Here’s what to do next. And so I think it saves a lot of time that way. – I have to validate that because as a consultant, my focus is first of all about doing the work for the client, but I also have a responsibility to keep my team members up to date with what I’ve changed. So if I can create a recap of what I have done for my clients, then I can also,(…) I’m sure you can use it in the Loop space, but I might also uplift that and put it into a team’s conversation. – Yeah, I’m glad to hear that’s been helpful. – Yeah.
So that’s recap and there are other ways to use Copilot in here too.(…) Some of the other focuses around Loop have been in the task and project management space. Can you tell me a bit more about what’s being mentioned or announced there? – Yeah, one of the things that we’re really focused on with Loop is having your information where you need it. And so what that means in terms of tasks and project management is integrating with the task fabric across Microsoft 365.
So I’ll give an example. Even before Loop was around, I loved using Microsoft To Do because all of my flagged emails and tasks that have been assigned to me all flow into one place. – So let’s pause there. – Yeah. – Have you done all your tasks for today? Have you checked your To Do list? How many flagged items have you actually gone back to? Go on, just pause now,
check on that and come back to the video. All right, you’re done? Cool. – All right, now that you’ve checked.
(laughing) So I love Microsoft To Do personally
not because I work for Microsoft, although that is a good reason, but because all of my tasks flow from all of these different places into one centralized place.(…) That is using the task fabric. And so because Loop is integrated with that, any task list that I make in Loop will automatically sync and that’s two-way sync with both To Do and Planner.
So one of the things that I think about is for my personal tasks, I like to view them in To Do and that’s in the assigned to me section. We can probably put that in the B-roll as well so I just want to see what that looks like.
For Planner tasks, I think that’s really helpful for a group project.
So we could just go back to your consulting example. When you are consulting on a new project, I would imagine you may work with other teammates and in that scenario, a Planner might be really helpful. So you can both have a task list in To Do that syncs with Planner. And additionally, you can take a Planner and Planner no matter where it is and paste the URL onto a Loop page and see that unfurl and have your full Kanban board experience or however you prefer to view your tasks. – Yeah, yeah, and recently too, with the Loop component for Planner, being able to use that and actually select the plans that you might have been recently working on so you can bring those in too. I’ll expand a bit on that because I know, and this may become across as a tough question, maybe not, but we know that when we use Collaborative Notes, which has been another successful area that Loop has been used in teams,(…) let’s just pause there and talk about what’s working really well.
It is, I think, one of the more highly adopted experiences of Loop, would you say? – I would say so, yeah. – Yeah, so if you’re in the habit of preparing for a meeting and adding Collaborative Notes to it beforehand, you’ve got the agenda, you’ve got a space to take notes,(…) it’s also something you can trigger if you have forgotten during the meeting, you can add those notes. And it’s all captured and powered by a Loop component down the right-hand side. And let’s just talk a little about the early journeys of that, we could create a Loop component, add it to the group chat as part of the team, but it always felt narrow. And now we’ve got Collaborative Notes, it feels like it’s custom-made and it fits nicely. – Yeah. – Yeah. So when we have a meeting like that, there’s follow-up tasks. And as we put those follow-up tasks in,(…) if they’re assigned to Rebecca or to myself, we see that in Planner for ourselves. But it’s a special kind of Planner. What’s happening there? – I don’t know how to answer that. – Oh, I’ll answer that, I’ll answer that. Yeah, no problem. So we’re all familiar with how Planner usually works, it’s connected to a Microsoft 365 group, might be connected to a team.
But when it is Collaborative Notes, it is a plan that sits out on its own that’s attached to the meeting. And that’s where the Loop sits as well.(…) So that’s an interesting approach, but I think one that’s important, especially as we go forward and we think about having meetings with guests. – Yeah. – You know, guest access is not available yet, but it is on the roadmap, absolutely, don’t worry. – Yes. (laughs) – In fact, it’s getting closer.(…) But the need to be able to share those notes with guests as part of our meeting, that’s why we do need to have that plan or those notes, sitting as its own thing, sitting out there that people can share easily with guests. – Yeah. – Yeah, I won’t go too far into that challenging part there, but I’ll follow up with another video, that’s what I’ll do.
(laughs) Rebecca and I talked about being able to bring a plan in from an existing plan, from your team into a Loop page, and we can talk about that, we can see the plan, and we can see the Kanban board view.(…) We’ve got that other direction where we’ve created a plan as part of a meeting. How do we bring those tasks from the meeting and into an existing plan so that it all feels like it’s part of that? So as I said, I’ll follow up with a short video about that, but just take a look at the ability to move a task between plans. There’s your hint.
(laughs) So yeah, I mean, there’s some great developments around other components as well, as we look and we use the forward slash.
What else was there? Let’s have a look. – Yeah, let’s just type that forward slash. I feel like that’s a great way to explore what’s going on in Loop. – It’s actually something that I encourage our audience to the do occasion. If you are looking at Loop, you might not necessarily see things announced in a blog post that will say, “Hey, this new feature is there.” So do check that out when you do use the, oh, I do know. Tell us about, tell us about what’s happening in tables at the moment. – Oh yeah, absolutely.(…) So we started out with tables in Loop as quite simple. We wanted to provide a table for people, but there are a lot of additional features we wanted to add. So some of the big ones right now are sort and filter, kind of table stakes tables, if you will, to allow people to just use more information freely. Oh, sorry, were you gonna say something? – No, no, no, it was like table stakes tables. (laughs) Very good.
– We’re already connecting well, it’s all about the puns. – It’s all about the puns. One of the other things that we know people want to do is view their information in different views.(…) So one of the things that we can do here, I can actually just show you, is if I add a column to my table that is a label column, let’s just give it the label priority, for example.
I will set something as maybe medium priority.(…) And once I do that, I have an option here that says view my table as a board. And so if I do that, I can see that all of my different cards that I have here are in rows, kind of like a Kanban board view.(…) I can also open it up and see it like that. And so these are things that we’re working on to make tables feel a little bit more like databases, because we know that’s a big request from folks, and one that we’re slowly working on.
– And I like that the board view is, well, it hints towards that there might be other views, but I think the board view is a good way to, we traditionally see it as a way to manage tasks, but I think the way that you’re able to have any label and order those buckets, if you will, as a way of organizing that information, the Kanban board doesn’t have to be just about tasks, then does it? – Right, yeah, exactly. You can kind of prioritize or do whatever you need with those tags. – Yeah, yeah.(…) – So there’s something else that has also been recently announced, which is these new rules.
So this was a recent announcement in a blog post talking about the power automate behind that and the automation that can happen.
So what I like about this, and it’s a first release, there will be more capabilities, but the first release is that the rule that you can set here looks for a condition, what’s changed in this column. And then if something has changed, what do I do based on that change? So we could choose a column and let’s say that priority might become or is equal to, let’s just say equals, and then select,(…) something maybe becomes a high priority. So our team have changed a item in this list that now needs our focus. What’s gonna happen to that? Well, we can automate it and we can send a message, email, send it in chat, send it to, yeah, even a message into a channel. And so that means that we are bridging that gap between how we work together as a team and organize our information and maybe our activities in a table, but we’re also telling people that,(…) hey, this is high priority now, let’s circle around this as a team.(…)
And it actually draws people back into the loop. – Yeah. – Yeah. So that message goes out and you can see the component in the message and you can start work on it right there. – Yeah, absolutely. And I would say like, this is another one of those things where we’ve had lots of customer feedback on being able to automate workflows and kind of just the beginning of what we’re working on in terms of automations. – That I think is a theme, Rebecca, that, for quite some time while we were using this in public preview and trying things out, leading up to GA, there was a lot of moving parts to try and make sure that the core things did work correctly.
And now that it is GA,(…) everything that you’re starting to release into this product is hints to, you might say, the framework or the infrastructure for other things to come. – Yeah, absolutely.
– And I had something in mind there that I was going to mention and it’s now, you know, pumped out of the head.(…) So that is tables, something else that other customers have definitely been asking about is our collapsible headings.
There we go, collapsible hitting one, two, and three. – Yes. – Yeah, so what were you hearing from customers about these headings and what they were hoping to get from them? – Yeah, a lot of what we heard is that customers have used collapsible headings as a way to basically have their information in a more readable state. So I’ll give an example of something I do a lot, which is write feature specs.(…) My feature specs can become quite long and a way to make that a little more readable is by using the table of contents block, which we can show in B-roll if we want, but an easy way to scroll around. But another easy way to make content a little more readable on a large page is by allowing users to collapse under a heading.
So maybe one example is I have a list of all of the languages that something is gonna appear in. That’s helpful when I need it, but quite long when I don’t. And so if I can just collapse that under a heading, it’s a really great way to kind of just make my spec a little more readable and charitable for others. – That collapsible state, to be honest, haven’t looked as closely at it, because I try out loop, it’s my experience. But if I expand that section, is it expanded for others?(…) –
That I don’t know, we should test it out. – We should test it, yeah. Well, again, we’ll show you in B-roll, love this.(…) Yeah, but I think that, as you say, it’s a good way to bring information together, but tuck it away into a nice tidy way of presenting on the page, as opposed to having pages and sub-pages. So that’s the other way that we could organize the information in something of a collapsible way. The other thing I’d probably test too is it’s a heading. Does it actually get picked up by the table of contents? We’re trying this live now, people. – We’re trying it live. – Yeah, so let’s go here, forward slash, try the table of contents, T-O-L-A-T-O. See, no,(…) table, oh, there it is. – Right there, there we go.
– It does, all right, so I purposely misspelt that crazy looking collapsible heading as, you’re too foo.(…) I don’t know what language it is, so apologies if this is offensive. It might be talking about your grandmother’s donut. I don’t know. But it has been picked up as a heading in the table of contents, fantastic.
So we can jump directly to that.(…) – Perfect, there we go. – Yeah, I think this, as a micro comment here, off to the side,(…) do you feel that there’s so much happening in the loop team and things are being released so quickly that perhaps even yourself, it might be hard to keep up? – I would say definitely. It’s an exciting place to be. I think as a newer team, we’re able to move pretty quickly(…) compared to the size of the company. But it’s definitely, it can get overwhelming at times of, oh my gosh, I had no idea we had needed that. But it’s not that far with the progress. So it’s definitely, there’s a lot of work just chatting with people and understanding where we are with different features. – Definitely.(…) You don’t have to talk about the detail, but is there some huge loop somewhere that the team is invited to to see all of these changes? – Yeah, we’ve been experimenting with different ways as we grow as a team. But I think what we’ve done the latest is have feature crews update different dates.
When are things in preview? When do we release things to the public so that we can talk more openly about different features we have? And yeah, you could say it’s a mega loop. – Mega loop, yeah. And it could be a good reason to use the table rules that when something changes that the whole team gets a message in the channel. – Yeah, most definitely. – Yeah, look, I know you and I could talk loop all day,(…) but this is a time bound episode and I’m sure I’ll have to edit a little bit. But it’s been a real pleasure looking at loop. And I think in terms of calls to action, I think it’s important to say that if you’re an IT pro that has potentially(…) taken a look at loop early on and thought, no, no, it’s not ready for our organization yet, we’re gonna turn that off.
That’s what I was gonna finish on.
Admin tools, admin tools. So Derek Liddell, am I saying his surname correctly? – You are, yeah. – Yeah, yeah, so Derek Liddell from the Loop team working on the engineering side and they’ve been putting a lot of work into catching up and making sure there are tools to be able to administer loop. So what is shortly coming is where we can see our loop workspaces.
Today or beforehand, we could not find them unless we’re a member of them. But as an admin shortly, you’ll be able to go to the SharePoint admin center. And there is a new section that will be there for managing the SharePoint embedded spaces. That includes loop, but it could be other applications that might be using SharePoint embedded too.
So again, I’ll encourage the IT pros out there that security and compliance tools are maturing your ability to see workspaces and assign a new owner or delete, recover, restore. All of those features are starting to build. Again, it’s going to keep building,(…) but that’s something I wanna leave with the IT pros there that take another look at loop and consider also just trying a little pilot. I would say a little pilot with people that are friendlies that have a real use case for working together as a team and learn from that rather than necessarily showing off and not using loop at all. – Yeah, exciting news on the IT pro front. – Absolutely. Well, Rebecca, it’s been a pleasure to be here at Microsoft headquarters and talking about loop and fantastic to be in the place where it’s all coming together. – Yeah, thank you so much, Gerald. I’m glad you could visit us here where we make the product. – Excellent. Well, yeah, hopefully we’ll see you again soon online. – Yes, hopefully so. Thank you.