“The technology is effectively Microsoft’s vision for the future of Office, breaking down the rigid barriers between different types of file format, allowing content to be deconstructed into modular components that can easily be shared between applications, making it easier to create content collaboratively.”

Announced two years ago, the Fluid Framework aims to remove barriers between Microsoft 365 applications, allowing app components such as tables, charts, and lists to be embedded into different apps and updated in real-time by multiple users. For example, changes made to an inventory list table or updates to meeting notes in OneNote will instantly be viewable if the component is also embedded in Outlook or Teams.

These Fluid elements, called “Loop components”, are one of the three key elements in the new app. These Loop component building blocks can be embedded into a Loop “page” that serves as a shared canvas, containing a variety of information sources that relate to a certain team project.

Loop pages can be organized into Loop workspaces. Photo Credits: Microsoft

Loop components will be available in Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneNote later this month. The company promised more details about the  availability of the standalone Loop app “in the coming months.” According to Raúl Castañón, senior analyst at 451 Research, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence:

“The launch of Loop is a bold move by Microsoft. Word processors are long overdue for a new approach.”

He sees the Loop app as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, traditional document-editing applications.

Loops are made of up various Loop “components.” Photo Credits: Microsoft

Dynamics 365 Loop component on its way

In related news, the new Loop component that connects Dynamics 365 records to apps in the company’s Office 365 suite has been mentioned.

Connecting its business apps with productivity tools, such as the ability to embed Teams chat into the Dynamics 365 Sales app has been a central focus for Microsoft.

The new Loop component has been also announced at Ignite Microsoft this week. It builds on the idea, enabling users to pull up a customer record directly in Teams and edit information such as changing a sales opportunity status to “in progress,” while highlighting which user is making changes. The Loop component is going to be available in public preview by the end of 2022.

The announcement follows similar moves from Salesforce rival Microsoft, which integrated its Teams collaboration platform into Dynamics 365 in recent months to improve information sharing for staff using Microsoft’s CRM tools.

With Slack-First Customer 360, sales reps will be able to access and update Salesforce records with “digital deal rooms” in Slack; Salesforce cited a study from Forrester Consulting that suggests sales cycles are 15% faster when using team collaboration app. Automated daily briefs provide sales staff with a personalized list of tasks, meetings, and deals.

For customer service teams, integration with Salesforce Service Cloud will enable the creation of Slack channel “swarms” to resolve customer problems quickly, while an “expert finder” feature can “automatically identify” staff equipped to help with high-priority cases “based on availability, capacity, and skills.”

And for marketing staffers, there will be access to information from Datorama within Slack. The integration allows marketing staff to receive notifications of changes to marketing materials. These three Slack-First Sales, Service and Marketing features will be available in the pilot this fall, Salesforce said; the Datorama integration is available now.

Salesforce also announced plans to integrate Tableau into Slack, with notifications of changes within the analytics tool, such as a sales pipeline drop, as well as “watchlist digests” to provide a daily update on certain metrics. Slack-First Analytics is set for general availability this fall. Wayne Kurtzman, research director at IDC, said:

“Slack and Salesforce had two jobs: Don’t break either product and make both better than the sum of the parts. They did this by avoiding the temptation to quickly integrate the two interfaces, yet effectively enable integrations that streamline work.”

The integrations will enable both products to “do what they do and improve on that with a channel-based conversational layer that can trigger actions within the Salesforce stack,” he said.

While the two companies already had some integrations between their tools, this week’s announcement indicates Salesforce’s intention to tie the platforms together more deeply and to maximize cross-fertilization between them, said Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insight.

Although the integrations should be useful in bridging user workflows, the process is in its early stages and the platforms remain very much separate.

Principal program manager Adrian Orth said that the preview is “a big leap forward in the convergence of model-driven apps and canvas apps into a single Power App,” though adding that standalone canvas apps will remain supported.

Cloud migration has been good for Microsoft’s business application business, and in its latest financials, the company noted “Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 49 per cent (up 42 per cent in constant currency).” Power Platform, a low-code application platform that ties into Dynamics as well as other parts of Microsoft’s cloud such as SharePoint and Office 365, performed even better.

In the earnings call yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella said that “The number of organizations using PowerApps has more than doubled year over year … all-up, Power Platform revenue increased 83% over the past year.”

Although Redmond likes to talk up the notion of citizen developers, Nadella mentioned “pro developers and domain experts’ ‘ using Power Apps, in reference to Toyota’s use of the platform.

In some ways, though Power Apps is like Microsoft Teams: dig into it, and find not a single platform but rather a number of different ones bolted together. This is evident when users go to create a new Power App and are asked whether it is a Canvas app or a Model-driven app that they require. A Canvas app presents a screen where components such as buttons, text and charts can be arranged onto a design surface, whereas a Model-driven app is more perplexing for the uninitiated.

A new-style designer (also in preview) invites developers to add pages which can be either tables or dashboards, or a Classic designer deals in Entities, Dashboards and Business Processes. Model-driven apps generate their own user interface when run.

Model-driven apps make the most sense to those who have tangled with Dynamics 365, with one way to look at it as a form builder for Dynamics 365 entities and processes. It is very different from the free-form Canvas apps and Microsoft appears to recognise this as a problem. At the Business Applications Summit in May, Director of Product Management Ryan Cunningham posted about how the feature would “bring together canvas and model-driven pages into a single, cohesive application.”

Custom Pages let developers add Canvas-style pages to a Model-driven application. In order to use Custom Pages, developers must also use the new preview designer. Custom Pages support Fluent UI components and custom canvas components as well as the standard offerings.

While this is a significant improvement for Model-driven app developers, they should note the preview is not production-ready and there are plenty of issues, such as “when a user with no Power Apps user privileges opens a custom page in the model-driven app, they will see an error mentioning no active entitlements to use PowerApps” – an example of the complex licensing for Power Apps causing an issue which no doubt will be resolved in a later iteration. In principle, Custom Pages “follow the license for the model-driven app,” according to Microsoft’s FAQ.

When we looked for the Custom Page option in our Power Apps designer we did not see it – the word in the community is that “you should see it on Thursday or Friday of next week.”

As businesses pour more data into Microsoft’s platform, the built-in application platform becomes correspondingly more attractive as a way of creating applications based on that data. Microsoft still has work to do though in making it more intuitive and coherent for developers (citizen or otherwise) and although only a partial move in that direction, the addition of Custom Pages to the Model-driven variety of app will likely be welcomed.

It was the company’s first opportunity to showcase some of the experiences made possible by Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed-reality platform powered by Azure that allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many kinds of devices. Alex Kipman appeared on the Ignite virtual stage as a fully realized holoportation, narrating the show in real-time. He shared:

“This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning. You can actually feel like you’re in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you’re not physically together.”

Microsoft Mesh will also enable geographically distributed teams to have more collaborative meetings, with conducting virtual design sessions, assisting others, learning together and hosting virtual social meetups. People will be able to express themselves as avatars and overtime use holoportation to project themselves as their most lifelike, photorealistic selves.

Photo Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft Mesh also benefits from Azure’s enterprise-grade security and privacy features, as well as its vast computational resources, data, AI and mixed reality services. Alex Kipman continues:

“More and more we are building value in our intelligent cloud, which is Azure. In these collaborative experiences, the content is not inside my device or inside my application. The holographic content is in the cloud, and I just need the special lenses that allow me to see it.”

With Microsoft Mesh-enabled applications, designers or engineers who work with 3D physical models could appear as themselves in a shared virtual space. Architects and engineers could physically walk through a holographic model of a factory floor under construction and potentially avoid costly mistakes.

At Ignite, Microsoft announced two apps built on the Microsoft Mesh platform. Those include a preview of the Microsoft Mesh app for HoloLens, which allows team members to remotely collaborate and is available for download. Customers can also request access to a new version of Mesh-enabled AltspaceVR, which will allow companies to hold meetings and work gatherings in virtual reality.

Microsoft Mesh’s open standards will give developers the freedom to build solutions that will work across many different devices: HoloLens 2, a range of virtual reality headsets, smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Over time, the company said it expects customers will be able to choose from a growing set of Microsoft Mesh-enabled applications built by external developers and partners, and also to benefit from planned integration with Microsoft products such as Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365.

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