We saw Google’s answer to Notion back in May. Now we officially have Microsoft’s too — or you could compare it to Google Wave (put to rest in 2010) as TechCrunch did. No matter who did what first — people are pretty impressed with Microsoft’s delivery now.

Microsoft introduced Loop, a new app for collaborative documents, at its Ignite conference yesterday. If you were following closely, you might have seen this coming.

In 2019, Microsoft introduced Fluid Framework, a new platform for developers to build real-time collaborative products. Then last year, the company put the code on GitHub, open-sourced it, and announced they were building Fluid into its productivity apps.

Loop is made up of three parts: components, pages, and workspaces. Components are live content, from standard items like lists and tables to sales opp records via Dynamics 365 records. Updates to components happen in real-time, across multiple apps. Developers will be able to build third-party Loop components, too.

Pages are pretty self-explanatory, and a workspace is a whiteboard-like hub where your components live. You can see them all at once (including the ones not built by Microsoft) and who’s working on them.

Loop hasn’t been given a release date (“the upcoming months”) but we’re supposed to see components arriving inside of Teams, Outlook, and OneNote this month.

That will hold us over until 2022, when we can use Mesh for Teams too. It's Microsoft’s metaverse platform for work which looks a whole lot like Facebook’s Meta’s Horizon Workrooms.

Mesh will let users create avatars and, like Horizon Workrooms, your movements and gestures are mimicked in the metaverse within an immersive office space where you can use Teams features like Together mode and Presenter view. Or you can all get “out of the office” to somewhere more fun — a team-building location of your choosing.

"As a company whose focus is on productivity...it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. It’s all coming together," said Microsoft Technical Fellow and HoloLens creator, Alex Kipman.

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