Will Microsoft Loop improve adoption of Teams channels?

For a long time, I always wondered why teams' channels were not more widely used.

Stats I have seen for from various sources suggest that people just chat messages in teams.

There appears to be for numerous reasons for this

The Where

First the additional mental process of thinking where do I post?

As not only do you have to think about that but then find that place.

Remember for finding a Team or a channel the quickest way is the filter at the top of Teams, don’t go scrolling if you can help it.

The Who

Next who is the audience for your Post?

Is everyone in your intended audience a member of that Team?

Often you require to communicate to people both inside and outside the Team to get their input and you just don’t know if they are included in the Team you are going to post in.

You could look up the Team membership or add those people to the Team (Please don’t do that).

This is just added steps that appear unnecessary. Adding people to a Team just for a single post or two is both overkill and could have risk attached. Not to mention adding yet another Team to the ever-growing sprawl that those people now must manage.

Spamming everyone

Before you send a post to a Teams Channel there is also a fear that people are effectively spamming their Team. Wasting the time of team members that the post is not relevant to. This one comes down to training and understanding on how to manage channel notifications, using @ mentions and tags in larger Teams. However not everyone has truly mastered that yet.

The Result

This all-causes people to revert to the old ways to communicate. Chat or worse email, where they can easily target exactly who they need to communicate to with. This reduces the need to have those additional thought processes and reduces fear of putting something in the wrong place.

The impact is that it becomes a separate conversation outside of a Teams Channel. Which negates the benefit of channel posts when it comes to keeping a history of all events and everyone working collaboratively.

The current advice is to use larger Teams and @ mentions.

This relies on several key things.

1. Everyone you need still needs to be a member so that is still part of the thought process

2. Everyone having channel notifications set properly. This is a learned behaviour but still an initial problem

3. The content you are sharing being non-confidential and relevant to the team. You need to again have a thought process around this.

Future Fixes to this

My first thought was what if posts had unique permissions and that people were just added to a channel post. The result being regardless of where the item is the right people get notified and access to it.

This being remarkably like using modern day comments on a Word document. When you @ mention someone they get access to collaborate on the file automatically.

Light bulb moment, Microsoft Loop components do that in chat. 😀

Now if we don’t (yet) have Microsoft loop components in Teams posts. 🤨

The benefits of that would be able to see who has access to post in the post itself, share it with people outside your Team without having to worry about access issues. Simply @mention them in the loop component inside a post and you are done.

It won’t matter where the person gets notified of the post or where they interact with it.

Now this functionality is not there yet or even on the publicly available roadmap. 😢 I don’t even know if this is the way microsoft are thinking about loops, I sure do hope so.

Today you can put a Loop into a post, but it is not a native experience as in chat. It is just attached to a post like any other file. The key thing here is it doesn’t show the contents of the loop in the Post without opening the loop. You would still be collaborating on the web page experience of the loop and can include others you invite in who are outside your given team to participate using the link to the loop. Just remember the loop itself is still in the OneDrive of the person who created. If you are using it for a quick collaboration that should not be an issue if you copy back the final loop into the post, so you don’t lose it.

Conclusion

Effectively all this is about sharing Teams messaging at a more granular level.

Sharing to work as a Team is great until it is overkill for your scenario.

Sharing specifically at a channel level is not an option. Without creating a new private or Shared channel. Which creates more places to manage.

I do hope Microsoft implement Loops natively in Teams posts as it makes so much sense.

Thoughts? Would you like this type of collaboration as a native experience?