M365 News for February
Let's Talk About Loop
So far in February, it’s been a little quiet on the big news front, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t much going on with M365 and people talking about M365.
One topic of conversation I’ve seen a few times is about Loop. As it matures, is it a OneNote killer?
Or is it another way to get Planner functionality?
I’ve used Loop a little bit and introduced it to some users. It’s ambitious. It’s cool. It’s nerdy. It’s also confusing. When a user asks, “What do I use this to do?” the answer isn’t clear. Yes, you can use it with meetings to craft an agenda, update it with notes, and even assign tasks in one place. But those tasks don’t appear in an existing plan. The meeting notes become a separate list in the Planner app without connection to previous meeting tasks. One of the first things that happened when I showed someone the ability to assign tasks on the fly during a meeting was about how they could track all the tasks assigned across meetings for a project.
For that, you’d have to use Planner and pull that into every set of meeting notes, I guess? So, I think it will either prove so flexible and powerful that it makes more than a few M365 apps irrelevant, or it will be so confusing that it never takes off.
I don’t think there’s an in-between.
I’ve also written about the eDiscovery nightmare of tracking down information from Loop components, which users will see in Teams and inside meeting invites but isn’t stored there. I didn’t cover the possibility that the meeting agenda you saw in Outlook would be updated and display the notes after the meeting and still not be in the email collected from Exchange. I’m not sure the legal industry is ready for this.
What do you think about Loop?
In other news:
This month, this company is offering a free 30-day trial for OneDrive and Teams training. This could be useful if you or your coworkers haven’t looked at all the features and nuances. - https://leadershipthroughdata.com/free-trial/
A Contrast and Comparison of Retention and Sensitivity Labels
If you’re rolling out Copilot, this new documentation is important - Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for Microsoft Copilot.
And if you’re looking for a reason to consider Copilot for 365, this is as good a reason as I’ve seen - Copilot for Teams Extracts Value from Meetings.
Teams Changes How the Website Channel Tab Works - I get the security reasons for this, but it will be a blow to organizations that use the Website tab to allow users to interact with other document repositories inside the Teams interface.
This might also interest some of you in the legal field - Microsoft is testing the detection and removal of sensitive info from documents via Azure AI.
Finally, a couple of “best practices” opinions”
That’s it for the news roundup. We’ve been looking forward to some new features, and I’m hopeful they will show up so we can cover them in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned and subscribe so that you don’t miss anything.
Happy Mardi Gras to those who celebrate!