Microsoft Loop – Colaborate for Projects, Education, Teaching and Training!

In this article we look into a step by step guide and demo on Microsoft Loop. If you haven’t used this collaborative tool yet then your really missing out.

When working on projects and also delivering education training for teachers and students Microsoft Loop is a great tool. In a class or remote, students can get their work completed and teachers can get insights into their process.

One of the issues is that there are many places to store information across email, apps, meeting invites etc.

This information can get lost in the vast amount of apps and devices we use and isn`t really
collaborative across projects and project teams to all get the best out of what we are working on.

Microsoft Loop really does have the potential to revolutionise how we work together and collaborate across email, meetings, teams and documents so that all your information and data continues to stay in one central place and everyone is working from a central point.

We can increase productivity that brings teams, content, and tasks together across various tools and devices. It combines a powerful and flexible portal with portable components that move seamlessly and stay in sync across applications, allowing teams to collaborate, plan, and create together.

In this demo we are going to present a scenario where a trainer or teacher delivers a training day to students on a introduction to programming. We will use Microsoft Loop to create all the workspaces and components that we will use to deliver and setup the training and then demo how to collaborate between teacher and students delivering training and collaborating bring all the content together.

Microsoft Loop Workspaces

In a workspace we can add a meeting notes, word documents, spreadsheets and other pages.
A workspace contains everything regarding our project. Simular to a file system for a project where everyone works together centrally and collaborates cross documents, components, pages etc.

Subpages

Once we have created our main workspace then we can add some subpages, the first in this demo is the agenda of our days training. Once added we can the share the page link from the top left and copy the link and then click back to our workspace. In the work area we can add the agenda for all students to be able to find it from our main Microsoft Loop workspace.

We then created a new subpage for our lunch menu to choose what food students decide to have for there lunch break. Teachers can then get a real time response from a table that students updated, giving the teacher exact information to order food before the 10am deadline!

Kanban board

A Kanban board is a great way to map out tasks from start to finish for our project.
We created one from a template and added a tasks for students to track setting up their programming coding environment. We add this to the Kanban board and let the students own this as that’s a task they need to “to do” and complete with a target date. We copied the Kanban board link and added to the main workspace Microsoft Loop menu.

Sharing workspaces

Now we want to share the workspace with students on this course.
We click the share button and click workspaces. Then add in our students to the list and then invite. All the members are now shown that have access to this workspace.
We can see a notification via email is also sent looping in the student and inviting them to collaborate with the workspace.

Portal synchronization between pages

On the left portal we are logged in as a teacher, and on the right we are logged in as a student.
Both have access to the loop portal workspace that we created.
Student one has changed her mind about lunch and now decided to go for the Tuna Salad.
A soon as the student types in the table that she would like the Tuna Salad instead the teacher see an instant response.

Adding Microsoft Loop workspace to Teams

We can add a loop workspace to teams training programming already setup and have copied the workspace link. We add a new tab and add a website to teams and paste our workspace link. The site will be added as a tab and open in a browser window, posting to the channel about this tab. Now we can either click the new tab created for the team or the post which will take us to our workspace.

Create Microsoft Loop component

When you use a Loop component, you can paste into Teams or a Outlook message enabling you to edit it in realtime and see changes instantly. This is great for collaboration right inside a chat message to chat between teams. Clicking in the six dots allows creation of a loop component. On the right hand side you can then click copy component. Now we can literally paste our menu choice component and loop everyone in on a teams chat to make sure everyone sees this and makes their lunch choice before 10am.

Creating a Microsoft Loop Teams meetings with agenda

How often do we insert an agenda into our meetings via an email body? This isn`t very productive as we can`t easily interact and cross off what’s been covered or even add or amend meeting notes and follow up tasks in real time.

We also loose track of when meetings occur for our projects and find ourselves searching in Outlook calendars over the previous weeks or months as a reminder of when the meeting occurred, also trying to find out what was covered in the meeting around that time.

Well with Loop we can make things a lot more productive with meetings. We can create a teams meeting, choose our teams site and then add an agenda.

We can then see the meeting has been setup in Outlook ready for our attendance.

Wihin the meeting we can see the meeting agenda and we can tick off agenda items so everyone in the meeting will be able to see in real time. We can also add meeting notes as the meeting progresses.

The great thing about this is that meeting, including the agenda and notes are all in one place for reference to query for the next meeting so we can keep track. We can also add this meeting to our workspace, and add some follow up tasks.

Microsoft Loop Video Step By Step Guide

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Cloud Inspired authors have over 30 years experience within the IT industry, providing expertise and knowledge on infrastructure, hybrid, public and private clouds platforms. Detailed easy to follow technical videos, training and tutorial guides are provided by subject matter experts covering various technologies including Azure, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and Microsoft 365. This website focuses mainly on the Microsoft 365 and Azure Cloud platform and provides easy to follow step by step technical guides, diagrams, cloud certifications and tutorials. The aim is to deliver articles and videos on Microsoft 365 and Azure Cloud from start to finish on many different Azure services and certifications, building and increasing the viewers knowledge in a short, logical, easy to understand format quickly getting to the point of the subject matter! Check out the YouTube channel for a full list of published Cloud Inspired videos and lets get inspired about Cloud!

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