Why Choose Microsoft Loop as Your Wiki
A quick comparison of Microsoft Loop against other tools like Notion, Coda, Confluence and Sharepoint.
A couple of months ago Microsoft Loop was finally released into the wild (in Public Preview) and our team was anxious to try it out as we compared it to other tools like Notion, Coda, Confluence and Sharepoint. In the following article, I will cover:
- What is Loop?
- How does it compare to other wiki tools?
- Why we chose it?
- What is missing?
- How to enable Loop on your tenant?
Microsoft Loop in a Nutshell 🥜
Loop is made up of 3 components:
- Workspaces — A place that stores a collection of pages that can be shared with co-workers (Similar to a confluence space or notion teamspace)
- Pages — Publish, react, comment on pages and include loop components.
- Components — Probably the coolest 😎 part. There are different types of components: bulleted lists, checklists, numbered lists, paragraphs, tables, voting tables and task lists. All of them can be shared across different 365 apps such as Outlook or Teams. Anyone viewing these components view and edit them in real time across these different apps.
Why not Sharepoint?
We wanted a tool to help us with project collaboration, sprint planning and internal documents (wiki) for our scrum teams. Something that best supports brainstorming and that easily supports collaborative writing.
Doing this work in Sharepoint was deemed too clunky for that sort of stuff and we quickly moved on. Note — we also use Sharepoint for file sharing/versioning and our corporate intranet.
How about Notion, Confluence or Coda?
📝 The Editor / User Experience
Loop really draws its inspiration from some of the new breeds of wiki products like Notion and Coda. The page editor is certainly less clunky than Sharepoint or Confluence pages. Dev teams or more technical-savvy folks who prefer keyboard shortcuts with an inline editor will never look back!
I consider Confluence a more traditional wiki. It may still win over folks looking more for that classic Word-style editor with a ribbon/menu at the top. It also still wins on the immense amount of options (ex. table of content, navigation) and tie-ins to the Atlassian suite products. So if your team uses other Atlassian products like Jira or Bitbucket, Confluence may remain a compelling wiki tool.
Why we chose Microsoft Loop
Deep integration to 365
Being part of 365 is a big plus for us. My company uses Teams and Outlook a lot. Loop really shines here and Microsoft obviously knows it.
- Tag Users— Easily tag 365 users and assign them tasks (via the “@” shortcut)
- Include Docs — Easily search and include links to docs in Teams/OneDrive/Sharepoint (via the “/” shortcut)
- Share loop components — Pages can include components that can then be shared in Teams Chats or E-mails in Outlook which display in real-time with inline editing.
It’s Free! (For now… but watch out)
Microsoft currently offers their Public Preview for free. But there are some limitations. Companies requiring large workspaces or users with more than 5 workspaces may hit that limit pretty quickly:
- A Workspace cannot exceed 5 GB
- A User cannot have more than 5 Workspaces
- A Workspace cannot include more than 50 members
So what’s next for Microsoft Loop?
Where’s Copilot?
Ever since Microsoft’s big announcement about Copilot, my inner Maverick has been looking for Goose. Some have deemed it a Juiced up version Clippy, and I’m certainly excited to see what this AI-powered assistant will suggest to me.
Alas, the toggle is still disabled in the “experiments” section of our Loop settings
Microsoft Loop and Teams are not Integrated Enough Yet
Microsoft claims more is coming to loop but for now, a couple of fundamental things are still missing with the Public Preview
- Cannot provide a loop component in a Teams Channel — For now only Teams Chats support loop components. A huge bummer for folks doing a lot of collaboration in Teams channels. A request is open on Microsoft’s Feedback Portal to be able to share loop components in Teams channels. The only workaround is to create a tab to a loop page on the channel.
- A Team Workspace in Loop — There is no relationship between Teams and Workspaces. I would hope to see one day Loop workspaces that are linked to my 365 groups and Team (Similar to how you can have Sharepoint Site tied to Team). This way, when a user gets added to a team, they are automatically added to the workspace in Loop.
How to Enable and Try Microsoft Loop (Preview) for Yourself
To open the loop app, you’ll need to navigate to loop.microsoft.com, but it isn’t enabled by default on your tenant.
To enable the loop app on your tenant, your tenant administrator will need to go to config.office.com and follow Microsoft’s Instructions to enable some policies for your users, namely:
- Create and view Loop files in Microsoft apps that support Loop
- Create and view Loop files in Outlook
- Create and view Loop files in Loop
Remember that after the policy was created, it can take up to up to 24 hours before the policy becomes effective. In my experience, it worked after 5–10 minutes.
Happy note-taking, project managing or whatever else you decide to use Microsoft Loop for!
