The biggest change to Microsoft\u2019s Office documents in decades is coming to life soon, as the company\u2019s Fluid framework arrives in Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Outlook, and Whiteboard. Microsoft first unveiled Fluid last year, showing how the framework allows blocks of Office content to live independently across the web. That idea is now becoming a reality, with collaborative content that can be copied, pasted, and shared with others.<\/p>\n
Instead of tables, graphs, and lists that are static and bound to specific documents, Fluid components are collaborative modules that exist across different applications. They will begin showing up in Microsoft Teams first this summer, embeddable in meetings and chats. <\/p>\n
The launch of Fluid documents coincides with employees returning to their offices and the rise of a new hybrid work experience. \u201cWe were excited about going hard and fast with Fluid, and then the pandemic hit,\u201d says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. \u201c<\/em>So we largely put a lot of our energy onto Teams, and we think of Teams as the scaffolding that creates the connection, but now as we move back to hybrid, we increasingly believe we need more innovation in what I call the canvas that gets collaboration done.\u201d<\/p>\n What Microsoft has created with Fluid is the biggest change to Office in decades. While Fluid seemed like a great future-facing concept during its reveal last year, watching Microsoft demonstrate it this week has really highlighted how transformative this could be. <\/p>\n Every Microsoft Teams meeting will soon come with a built-in notes experience that\u2019s collaborative. Notes will show up within a Teams meeting or in an Outlook calendar, and anyone on the invite can just start typing away in real time. If you add a task, it immediately syncs to your other tasks across Microsoft 365, and the meeting notes are automatically synced to your Outlook calendar where you can also edit them in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want collaboration to be able to start before the meeting starts, so as soon as the invite goes out,\u201d explains Ron Pessner, a director of program management working on Fluid at Microsoft. As the meeting notes in this particular example are live and real time, you can even copy them into an app like OneNote and you\u2019ll still see everyone making edits to them.<\/p>\n This living Fluid component has the potential to shift how everyone gets work done across Microsoft Teams and Office. It\u2019s impressively quick, with no sync time, just like Google Docs. Microsoft has had similar collaboration tools in Office for a while now, but they\u2019ve been restricted to static documents and nothing on this level of freedom.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to be launching the components in Teams this summer,\u201d says Pessner. The meeting notes experience will be available in preview later this year, alongside some tests integrating it into the desktop version of Outlook. It\u2019s likely that as we see Fluid components roll out, they\u2019ll appear first in Teams and on the web parts of Office before making their way to desktop.<\/p>\n Microsoft is also transforming its Whiteboard app into a canvas to host Fluid components. Whiteboard has long existed as Microsoft\u2019s first big collaborative tool, and this summer it\u2019s being overhauled with the help of Fluid.<\/p>\n New collaboration cursors will appear in Whiteboard, letting you see coworkers\u2019 additions to a document in real time. There\u2019s even a new virtual laser pointer that you can use to get people\u2019s attention, or reaction stickers to make the Whiteboard canvas feel a little more alive.<\/p>\n Fluid components like tables or task lists can also be embedded into Whiteboard, and the entire app will now look and feel the same across all devices and platforms. With Whiteboard, you could almost use the app as a dashboard to watch colleagues editing Fluid components in real time.<\/p>\n This is just the start of Fluid making its way to Microsoft 365, and we\u2019re bound to see more over the course of this year and beyond. It will be particularly interesting to see how Microsoft integrates Fluid more deeply into both Teams and Outlook, the main communications tools used by businesses that rely on the Office suite. If Microsoft gets the integration of Fluid right, it will forever change the way documents are created, shared, and, ultimately, how work gets done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The biggest change to Microsoft\u2019s Office documents in decades is coming to life soon,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[38,48,44,51,46,50,54,52,56,53,55],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1930,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/1930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}