Today marks the start of the Microsoft Loop app journey. The Loop app is now available in public preview! Loop is about people - people who want to create together with ease, no matter where they are or what tools they use. It’s a transformative co-creation experience that brings together teams, content, and tasks across your tools and devices. Loop helps you organize everything you need for your project into a single workspace and even does the searching for you to kick it off.
SharePoint provides the underlying storage and collaboration technology for Loop. We want to take a moment and share more about what happens under the hood and how we work with partner teams here at Microsoft. The outcome is to deliver a modern co-creation experience and provide a solid storage foundation for the future.
Enabling products like Loop to build and innovate quickly on the SharePoint platform requires significant planning and work. We would like to highlight four key areas that enhance user value while keeping IT security and compliance value intact:
Tree Structured Storage – Optimizing for innovation and performance, SharePoint has moved from a traditional file stream architecture to tree-structured storage. Leveraging B-Tree graph nodes allows us to unlock powerful collaboration capabilities and unmatched flexibility in a data structure that works for existing file types but also natively supports Fluid Framework, the underlying tech for Microsoft Loop. This architecture enables faster innovation allowing Microsoft Stream, Designer, Whiteboard, and other apps to build on the SharePoint platform.
Performance Optimizations – The Loop experience sets a new bar in editing and real-time collaboration, especially for speed and scale. This drives performance improvements – not only in core SharePoint – throughout our partners in Azure on Blob, SQL, Networking, as well contributions to Windows and Chromium http stacks. This intense focus on product experience benefits numerous Microsoft 365 and Azure scenarios today, with more to come.
Personal and Work - Today's Loop announcement is a major milestone because it is simultaneously available for both personal (MSA) and organization (AAD) accounts. This is the direct result of work inside SharePoint to support both authentication models. This enhanced SharePoint stack gives customers unified experiences with faster speed when new work and life scenarios appear.
Security and Compliance – By building on the core SharePoint platform, Loop components, pages, and workspaces inherit all of SharePoint’s industry-leading work on compliance and security. Sharing, permissions, authorization, and much more – enhancing trust as we work to implement the same capabilities for new products and services across Microsoft. From eDiscovery to fine-grained access control – adopting innovative features no longer means customers must wait for them to be secure and compliant.
Please read the full Loop announcement blog – which includes a nice, new explainer video: “New Microsoft Loop app is built for modern co-creation,” published by my colleague, Wangui McKelvey - General Manager, Apps and Endpoints - Microsoft. And note the new Loop Twitter handle: @MicrosoftLoop; give it a follow.
Congratulations and thank you to our Loop colleagues! We love being in the Loop. Many Microsoft 365 applications are powered by SharePoint – Loop, OneDrive, Sites, Designer, Syntex, Office, Teams, Viva, Stream, Whiteboard, Search, Yammer, and Lists. We do not take this lightly and enjoy the partnership now and into the future.
We're excited to share more on our platform journey and to see your feedback to improve the experience in Loop, Teams, SharePoint, and all of Microsoft 365 soon. Join us at the Microsoft 365 Conference (Las Vegas | May 2-4, 2023) where we will share more from our experts alongside announcements and depth training on Loop, OneDrive, SharePoint, Viva, Syntex, Outlook, Teams, Power Platform, and more. You can review all posted Microsoft-led sessions - including an opening keynote with @Jeff Teper - President – Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft.
Thank you for your time,
Zach