Hello it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach,
and this time we're going to be talking about Loop components.
Microsoft Loop was announced at Ignite a couple of weeks ago
and components are a feature of it.
Loop components are items that you would insert into Office documents
like tables and lists.
They can be reused in other apps and by other people
and the data in them is live and can be updated in real time.
Anyway, rather than talk about them too much
I thought I'd just show you how it works.
So in this video I'm going to create a Loop component in Teams and share it.
Then I'll show you how you can co-author a component in Teams and in your browser,
and then finally we'll look at where the Loop files are stored.
So let's have a look.
So I should point out that this feature is in preview in Teams at the moment.
I'm using the latest preview of the Teams app for windows here
and at this point, Loop components are only available from the chat app.
So I've got a chat going here with Amrit and Polly.
Let's imagine that we're working on a project together
and we want to get a task list to track our work.
To create the task list I'll use the Loop icon here.
When I choose that I get a list of components that I can add to my post
and I'll choose the task list.
The list is added to my post and I'll give it a title of 'Project Tasks'.
Before I post this I want to show you the sharing options I have at the top here.
By default anyone in my organisation could have access to this task list
if they have a link to it.
I can drop this list down
and change the scope of that sharing just to the people in this chat
which would limit it to Amrit and Polly,
or I could get very specific and choose individuals and groups.
I can also change what they can do with the task list by unchecking 'allow editing'
so they can't make changes to it.
So I've set the permissions.
Also notice the component is in draft.
Now I'll post it and the list is now live
and Polly and Amrit can see it from Teams
and they can start updating it.
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Now we're all adding tasks to the list
and this is all in real time,
and as we do you can see our presence indicators.
We all have different colours to make it easy to see who's who
and if i hover over them it will show me their full names.
Notice when I type an '@' sign into a task
it will show me a list of all the people in the chat that are using the component
and I can choose one, and that will create a clickable link
that shows me more detail about that person.
'@mentioning' is a feature found all over Loop components.
You can see that when we're in the same task
it will mix the colours,
And this button shows me who is currently updating the task list
and I can click here to see who has access to the list.
Even though the task list has already been posted to Teams,
I can still add more components to it.
If I wanted to add a table for my contacts here for example,
I can just type '/' and that will pull up the component menu again.
I'm going to choose a table and it's added to the post
and now we can all start adding data to the table.
Each column and row of the table can be moved and resized
and you can right-click it to show a detailed menu with more options
for managing how the table looks.
You can keep on adding more components to your post as you need to,
but for now let's look at how to edit this component in a page.
At the top here I have a title with a link
and then over here on the right I have a 'copy link' button.
What both links allow me to do is open this component in a browser.
If I click on the link here it will open a browser
and now I'm looking at the component on a page.
I can carry on editing here and so can Amrit and Polly,
and I can invite new people to come and work on this with us.
If I hit the share button up the top here,
it lets me create a share link in the usual way
and i'm going to share this with Sarah and send it to her.
She'll receive an email with a link to my page in it
and now Sarah is here editing the page with us.
We can update existing components
and add new ones as we need to.
And if I switch back to Teams you can see all those updates
are being added here too, in real time.
The key thing to remember here is that wherever the component is,
whether it's in the browser, in Teams or perhaps in the future in Outlook,
OneNote or Word, it can be updated in real time.
Okay so the last thing I wanted to show you was where these things are stored.
You can see at the top of the page here I have a drop-down,
and just like a Word doc or a spreadsheet
I have a file name that I can change and a path to its location
and I can even access the version history here as well.
If I choose the location link here, it will take me to that folder.
This folder is in my OneDrive
and because I created the component in Teams,
it's in the Microsoft Teams chat folder
and I can also see the file itself which is called project.fluid.
I can move that Fluid file to other locations
and it will still be available in Teams.
So access from Teams is not dependent on the location of the Fluid file.
Imagine being able to share a component in a OneNote page
so that everyone could update their task progress live in a meeting,
or doing the same from an email in Outlook.
This functionality is being added to those apps soon.
Loop components could enable all these types of scenarios really soon
so let me know what you think and how you might use them.
And if you can come up with a better name for them than 'components'.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
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