What Are Fluid Docs (Microsoft)?
Within the constantly evolving world, technology upgrades are necessary to maintain the flow of work. Most of you have already used Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Well, the company is now working to create a new kind of Office document. It’s called Fluid Docs. Hi guys! Welcome back to my YouTube channel, and, in this video, I will be telling you about Microsoft’s Fluid Framework that is newly introduced to enhance work quality. But before we begin, if you are new here, make sure you subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications so you never miss any updates.
Microsoft Fluid Framework
Microsoft Fluid is a collaboration of framework that complements Microsoft tools like Teams and Outlook. It is an exciting technology that is introduced recently and its popularity is growing rapidly. It is an open-sourced framework which means that this technology is compatible in client applications both within the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond. Fluid Framework includes shared projects, gaming, Team collaboration, and several ideation apps.
What Is Fluid Technology?
These components are basically live documents that you can access through any of the apps you’re currently using. So, it is very similar to how the real-time interactions work in a google document. The framework’s main goal is to handle the piping and mechanics of real-time updates so that developers can focus on the experience rather than dealing with synchronizing messaging and data. You can preview through existing live documents inside of Teams without even leaving the chat window. Also, you could open up a live document in an outlook board and be able to continue accessing it. These are designed to be easy to open and easy to interact with.
How Does Framework Work?
The Fluid Framework has been around for some time now. This Framework works on any popular frontend libraries or frameworks. In most cases, if you want to use the Framework, you require a server that is running a Service and the client applications that are housing Fluid Containers. There are multiple ways to meet both of these requirements that are the most powerful parts of fluid technology. When an application uses the Fluid Framework, it begins with the Fluid Loader. The Fluid Loader wraps a Fluid Container that contains all the mechanisms allowing clients to communicate with the Fluid Framework.
Fluid Container
This Container contains all the logic that communicates with the Fluid Loader and communicates back with the Fluid Service. Moreover, the Fluid Container also contains the Fluid Runtime, which includes Distributed Data Structures DDS that persist data to any clients connected to the application. The Fluid Service receives any change from the DDS as an OP. Whenever an OP enters into the Fluid Service, it persists the change within the DDS that it occurred and then generates the change to any connected clients. The Fluid Service mainly operates to maintain order, broadcast changes, and store data.
What Does Microsoft Fluid Docs Offers?
With the increasing prevalence of work-from-home opportunities, many companies are choosing to decentralize their office culture. They prefer to combine in-office and remote work these days. Some have even chosen to go completely remote. So, to adapt to this new form of work, Microsoft introduced Fluid Docs. Let’s discuss some of the advantages that Fluid Docs are offering you.
Collaboration
As companies are choosing to go remote, they rely more and more on collaboration apps. These enable them to get all their people in one place. They could then organize discussions on an ongoing project with all the members. The problem with the Team is that when members create files and documents, these aren’t updated unless they share them with the Team. It also becomes an issue when one user makes a change, and those changes don’t display on others’ systems.
Teams
Also, when members are working together live on Teams, they still have to pull up a separate app, like Word or Excel, to open documents. It may not be a problem for some users who use multiple screens, but it could be an issue for the majority of users. Microsoft Fluid technology intends to change this by allowing users to work on different documents in real-time. Instead of opening another program, members can now directly create lists, tables, and inside Microsoft Teams. More than that, all team members can add and edit their inputs, ensuring that everyone can view them and are on the same page.
More Than Meetings
Even when the Microsoft Teams meeting is ongoing, every component syncs across all team members. Meeting notes do appear in your OneNote app and Outlook calendar. Tables and graphs can sync with Microsoft Whiteboard, Outlook, and OneNote apps. Moreover, if you’re working on Whiteboard and a colleague is making changes in OneNote, you will be able to view the changes being made in real-time. That’s just the start. Microsoft intends for this system to work on more than just Windows and Office. They envision a future where users will use Fluid Docs on different platforms and apps.
Creative
Microsoft Fluid Technology is designed to make boring tables, charts, and lists always feel alive and editable. It will work this way no matter where you create them and regardless of how you share and copy them into other apps. Instead of getting a static and dull chart you copied from Excel, you will get a chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it, and you will see everyone making edits to it. It can be in the middle of an email chain, in a chat app like Microsoft Teams, or even in third-party apps eventually. Microsoft sees Fluid Technology as key to the future of productivity and a completely new way to collaborate that goes beyond Google Docs or Microsoft’s own existing Office.
Fast
Fluid Technology is incredibly fast, too. It allows more than one member to edit a single component or an entire workspace full of Fluid components in real-time. According to corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, Jon Friedman, Fluid is the concept of being freaky-fast. It is truly real-time for 5 or as many as 100 people to do editing at the same time. Fluid technology is a web-based framework that when combined with your apps can make your collaborations instantly responsive.
Comparison with Google Docs
Some people consider the Microsoft Fluid Framework quite similar to Google Workspace. This is because both allow for seamless collaboration within their respective ecosystems. Both of these offer real-time document collaboration, automatic notes, tasks assignment, and calendar integration. However, Microsoft takes all of this one step ahead. This is because every Component stands as its own content.
Fluid Framework
The Framework attempts to challenge Google Workspace by providing a web-based framework to enable real-time collaboration on data structures. It provides low latency for these data structures, which synchronize with endpoints to provide users with up-to-date information. Developers who build applications through Framework can easily enable dynamic in-line charts that stay updated by receiving constant information from their data sources. For instance, you’re managing six teams. You can create a table Component for each team showing what they are working on. You can then take these table Components and combine them all in the OneNote app. Doing this allows you to see what everyone is working on in one view. And it’s constantly updated in real-time.
Final Thoughts
So, what do you think? Are Microsoft Fluid Office documents better than Google Docs? If you have already used Fluid Docs, don’t forget to share your thoughts and valuable feedback with us in the comments section below. That’s all for today’s video and thanks for watching it. While you are here, click to watch one of these two videos appearing on your screen right now. I will see you there. Take care and stay tuned. For more articles please click here.