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Hi everyone, it's Matt. Welcome to Collaboration Coach.
Last year Microsoft announced the public preview of the Fluid framework
and pitched it as a new technology that would rethink the way we collaborate with Office 365.
The goal appeared to be to allow us to create content that lives in the cloud
and could be reused in different apps instead of only being available in one.
Microsoft compares Fluid content to reusable Lego blocks
and it claimed it wants to break down the barriers between apps like Word and Excel.
At Build 2020 in May, Microsoft announced some updates to the framework.
It's going to be open source and also some new features that will be added to Office 365 soon.
It's very early days for Fluid but I decided now's a good time to take a look and see how it's doing.
This video has my take on the public preview of the Fluid framework so far
and I'm going to demonstrate what it can do now and then give you my thoughts on what it will do next
and of course I'd love to know what you think, so please let us know in the comments below.
I'm going to demonstrate three things that Fluid can do now.
First of all - create a Fluid page, then I'm going to share the Fluid page,
and then I'm going to show you how co-authoring works.
That will give you an idea of what it could be used for as well.
So first of all, let's create a page.
Okay, so to get started you just need to go to fluid.microsoft.com and that will take you to this page...
...where you log in and then you just start collaborating
and I found the best way to understand Fluid is just to use it
so that's what I'm going to do for you now.
If I hit the "start collaborating" button, first thing it asks me to do is create a new file.
Every Fluid page is a file that's stored in either OneDrive or SharePoint.
I just need to give my page a title, so I'm going to call it "my project",
and you'll see in the "create in" drop-down, I've got a list of options there.
The top one is "my OneDrive which is Matt Munslow,
and then below that I've got a whole bunch of other Teams and SharePoint sites that I'm a member of
so I can save it in any one of those as well.
But for this demo I'm just going to save it in my own OneDrive.
So when I hit "create" it creates a new page for me and you can see it's completely empty.
I've got my title at the top but that's it
and any of you guys that have used Notion before probably recognize this format.
It's very similar to that.
The first thing I need to do is add something so I press on the "add component" button
and then I get a list of these components and they're all fairly straightforward to understand
and it's quite a basic list at the moment as well.
I've got things like action items, tables, lists, images and so on
so I'm just going to choose "action items" and you can see when I do that...
...it places the action items component at the top of my page
and I can change the name of it and I can add action items to it as well.
For example, if I just click in here and add an action, and then I can assign it.
One thing that's prevalent across all of Fluid is the ability to @mention people in your organisation.
If I choose the @ sign it shows me everyone I could choose.
And if I start typing someone particular like myself - I can choose Matt Munslow -
then that's like an active add there.
I can rollover it and it'll show me a picture and email address and so on.
I imagine that that's going to get a bit more feature-rich as we go on
so it will be a proper presence indicator where I can do things like make a phone call or chat.
It's got date pickers installed as well - ready to use, and that's kind of a basic action item there.
Now if I add another one - I just add a task here...
...add a second item and show you something else that @mentioning can do.
Right now remember this page I've created - no one else has access to it.
If I add someone else here, in this case I'm gonna add Megan and give her one of these action items,
it's gonna flag up the fact that Megan doesn't have access to this page
and asks me if I want to share and notify her that she's been added to this action item
so I hit "share and notify" here, and now Megan receives an email telling her she has access to this page.
Now notice up here on the top right-hand side - because sharing is obviously really important -
and there's a share button here and that allows me to basically share this page with anybody.
Megan already has access to it but there's a couple of other people I want to share it with as well.
Because it's in my OneDrive no one else has access, so I can give access using this "send link" dialog here.
Now any of you guys that have used SharePoint will be familiar with this.
This allows me to create a link that I can share with anybody or everybody.
And if I want to share it anonymously I can do that too.
They can just click on the link and they can start using the page in any browser.
I'm going to share this with Pradeep and Alex and then I'm going to hit the "send" button.
Now those two guys are going to receive an email with a link to this page
so they can open it up and start working on it.
Okay, so now I'm going to show you what the co-authoring experience looks like.
I've shared my page with a few people and now Pradeep and Megan both have it open
and they're working on it with me
but I know that because up in the top right corner here I can see a presence indicator for both of them.
Now what happens is, wherever they are on the page I'll see presence indication.
For example, if Pradeep starts to add a task I'll see it immediately
and as he types I will see his typing and I'll also see his presence indication.
Wherever he is, I'll see that he's there.
Lastly I want to show you how quickly this happens.
The real-time co-authoring is lightning fast
and although I'm doing a test with just three people, which obviously isn't really stretching it too hard,
things happen almost instantly.
And I'm just going to give you a demonstration of that now.
What I've got here is two browsers open on the same computer,
one is Edge and one is Chrome.
I've got Matt on the left and Megan on the right.
Now look what happens when I add an item on the left hand side.
If I go to the plus button here and I add a table, look how quickly it adds it - almost instantaneously
and then if I start to type you'll see the presence on the right-hand side is flagging up
and if I type, it happens almost instantly.
I also want to show you where the Fluid pages are saved.
If I go up to the top right corner of the page here, and you can see I've got this folder icon...
...and click on that, that will take me into my OneDrive
and you can see I'm in the Fluid Preview Documents folder.
Here's my Fluid page - so "my project.fluid".
Presumably this will change after the preview
but it does give us some insight as to how these pages will be stored in Onedrive and SharePoint.
Lastly I want to talk about what might come next, and I'm speculating here
but at the start of the video I mentioned how Microsoft wanted to break down barriers between apps
and I think that the next step is that we'll be able to take the items that have been created in our Fluid pages,
and reuse them in other Office 365 apps.
In our example where we created an action items list,
imagine that list being available in other apps.
You could take it and add it to an email or a Teams post or OneNote page
and because the list is Fluid, it would have live data in it wherever it was
and it could be updated from any app that it appeared in
and the updates would appear in real-time
so rather than opening up a specific app to update the data,
you could update it from whichever app or device was convenient for you.
So that's what I think the next step for Fluid might be but we'll have to wait and see what Microsoft does.
So that's my take. I'd love to know what you think so please let us know in the comments
and thank you so much for watching
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