Microsoft Officially Launches Loop, Its Notion Competitor (theverge.com) 32
Microsoft is officially launching its Notion-like productivity and collaboration app called Loop. From a report: Loop lets you use flexible, collaborative workspaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you're familiar with Notion's interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar -- right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key (which pulls up what Microsoft calls the "insert menu"). But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software.
if you're familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if you're familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea what "Notion" even is....
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I have no notion of what "Notion" even is...
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I have no idea what "Notion" even is....
A freemium graphical personal/group wiki with some database, note taking, and outlining features thrown into it. It's heavily used by productivity enthusiasts and has a community of people doing stuff around it, such as developing templates for many different user cases. The installable application version is your typical website-in-its-own-window Electron or the like webview app.
I tried it for a while and found it immensely confusing and not worth the trouble, even though I have a free premium version than
I really like Notion (Score:2)
A while back I started using Notion and I really like it. It has templates that rival JIRA [notion.so], so it is easy to make a JIRA/Confluence app competitor. I use it as such. Agile at home is what it is. I was stunned to realize how JIRA like it is when I start using it this way. (But you don't have to use this feature, and there's other ways to track tasks)
It is free to use, and I am replacing my $50/annual 'Remember The Milk' subscription with it. You can collaborate a little for free, which is great. Serious coll
Re:if you're familiar (Score:4, Informative)
I was recently tasked with trying to pull our mishmash of team documentation into a single, cohesive, web-friendly knowledge base. Notion came up among others. Watching the elevator pitch video though, it's a collaboration tool that's essentially a combination of SharePoint, Outlook, Project, and Teams. Looking at the Loop video, it's also a combination of SharePoint, Outlook, Project, and Teams...so I'm not sure why MS is making it other than to cannibalize marketshare from those products.
As an aside, if anyone has a recommendation for a good application that doesn't try to be too much more than a repo for team-based info (contacts, products, how-to's, etc.), I'd love to hear it. I'm currently using SharePoint pages to make a wiki, but it's a bit clunky and I fear I wouldn't get buy-in from some. I've also considered GitHub markdown, but that plus VSC would be too much of a learning curve for some (even though they should be using it). Another team uses Confluence, but that's also a collab tool and I feel like that's just too much noise.
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I'm not a fan of Confluence by any stretch, mostly because I've been forced to use it in areas where it's really not the right tool for the job. But if what you want is a wiki that non-technical people can create a page and then write like it's MS Word, Confluence is hard to beat.
Scary.... (Score:2)
I can't imagine ANY kind of reliability from a product MS has that taps into the combination of Teams, SharePoint and Outlook to make another collaboration tool!
I mean, seriously? SharePoint alone feels like such a neglected product. Microsoft seems to have a lot of eggs in the SharePoint basket (basically the "back end" for OneDrive so you can share content that's not just personally controlled on individual user accounts). Yet parts of the web UI suddenly revert to the look they had about a decade ago for
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Hmm ... (Score:5, Funny)
But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something wrong with that sentence. :-)
New ways to suck, how innovative! (Score:2)
> make it easier to cooperate on work
Isn't that what Teams was supposed to do? Yes, I know Team sucks rotting eggs, but that's because Microsoft made it, just like they made Loop*, so I expect Loop to similarly suck, perhaps more so because it's new and full of glitches and UI fopahs rushed to meet release deadline.
MS can suck because they bundle their crapware with MS OS and cloud infrastructure such that it's such a "great deal" orgs can't resist.
Your org: "But we don't want poop."
MS Sales: "But it's b
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They will FrontPage it. This will lead people to determine that WYSIWYG HTML editors suck and drive most other companies with WYSIWYG HTML editors out of business. Next, they will silently kill their product while working on a new product to kill another group of competitors. Rinse and repeat!
Oh god. You mentioned the thing which should not be named. *SHUDDER*
I still remember taking over a few sites that people made themselves with FrontPage once they got deep enough to start running into issues. The nightmare of trying to un-cluster that HTML was absolutely BRUTAL. When I get sent to Hell, that's at least going to feature in my daily routine if not be the ultimate forever job.
Porting Front Page? (Score:2)
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Creating a web page should have been the easiest part of the project. Figuring out what your client wants is always the hardest part. If they already had front page you were 90% done. Just never look at the actual HTML part, just look for the look and feel and functionality of what the client has and reproduce that.
It was a conversion from static HTML to a "real" website. "But I want it to be exactly the same." It was early years for me and I was determined to give them what they wanted. If I did it today, I'd just start from scratch. Or walk away screaming.
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That's why Flash designers loved Flash: you could take a sketch and make it look pretty damned close to the sketch, didn't have to deal with HTML's LSD-like wrapping and placement rules that work on place and fail on another.
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Correction: "That work at one place and fail at another", such as a different Windows or browser version or DPI setting etc.
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> Wasn't that what Sharepoint was supposed to do...
True that. Teams was an attempt to fix SharePoint for collaboration, but it seems they are trying yet another iteration.
MS needs to be under 3-strike laws: after 3 failed tries of collaboration-ware and GUI engines, they should be banned from trying 4+.
What? (Score:4)
What are they talkig about?
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It's just another to-do list. Nothing really of interest.
Oh goody (Score:2)
MS teams a failure? (Score:2)
Are they saying that yet another team collaboration tool is needed and doesn't that imply Teams is a failure?
Better summary (Score:2)
Microsoft Loop is an attempt to create a solution rivalling Atlassian Confluence. That's all.
Loop looks and feels remarkably similar (Score:1)
Norton (Score:3)
I read that as "Norton" at first, and was like "why the hell Microsoft wanna clone that trash?" - but now I see it as "Notion", and have no idea what the hell that even is !?
Reading TFA only confuses me more. Microsoft is like Google in that they have 50 different communication / collaboration tools, all of them suck in one way or another, and instead of fixing the existing tools, they just keep making more and more and more.
Both Microsoft and Google have the exact same problem: new players enter the market, people love the new tools more, so M/G try to clone em, but half-assed, full of bureaucracy. They fail to see exactly why the new tools are better: because new players need to listen to their goddamn users to get customers, whereas M/G rely on their big established names alone.
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They're trying to create a new product category, they just haven't figured out the need they're trying to fill. That's why all of them seem to reinvent the instant messenger and the hell that is the "living document" or whatever they're calling spreadsheet they email around or that lives on someone's personal Google drive against all reason, law, and policy. Apps like Slack and Teams are breeding grounds for nonsense like that.
Not available to A3/A5 licenses after March 2024 (Score:2)
I was surprised to see that they are not including this in standard A3/A5 licenses used by many educational institutions.
It seems really half-assed to role this out but exclude a huge collaborative market.
Just tried it (Score:2)
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