Welcome to episode 405
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded
live on 06/27/2025.
This is a show about Microsoft three sixty
five and Azure from the perspective of IT
pros and end users, where we discuss a
topic or recent news and how it relates
to you. The theme of today's show is
notebooks.
We have Copilot notebooks, OneNote notebooks, and Loop
workspaces, which aren't a notebook, but do contribute
to the confusion. We'll discuss how all of
these tools relate to each other and how
they might be used or how you may
or may not be able to find the
various content within each notebook or workspace.
So let's try to unconfusing the confusion
of where a notebook is not a notebook
unless a notebook is a notebook in the
right place. So let's just dive into the
show.
I don't even know where to start with
this one, Scott. I'm gonna not get ranty.
We're gonna try to walk people through this
and maybe try to wrap our heads around
this. And I saw the announcement about this.
We'll post some links to it. Now in
OneNote,
we have a new Copilot notebook section, which
correlates to a Microsoft three sixty five Copilot,
which we cannot seem to avoid
no matter what we do, also correlates to
a notebook,
which is separate from OneNote notebooks. Even though
Copilot notebooks now show up in OneNote where
you have OneNote notebooks going back to the
notebooks. I love the, like, provisional title that
you've put in place for this one. So
just to give people a sense for where
this is going,
Ben and I do some planning before these,
and we try and like game out what
could the title be. So Ben's proposal was
Loop Workspaces, Loop Pages, Copilot Pages, Copilot Notebooks,
and Copilot Notebooks in OneNote Notebooks.
Wrap your head around all that.
Discuss.
I agree.
So yeah.
Yes. Where do you wanna start with this,
Scott? Should we start with what is a
Copilot notebook or what our under understanding of
a Copilot notebook is? Yeah. Or how you
start with that? We got to start somewhere.
And I think given where we ended
up last episode
on kind of the
new Copilot landing experience
and all those kinds of things, I think
it's a natural extension to say, hey. Let's
go dive into
Copilot
notebook land
since Copilot
notebooks
and pages in Copilot
are now kind of front and center,
and
I don't know what I'd call them, like
a hero experience or like a first experience
when you land in what's now the new
default M365
landing page.
So as a user, you're going to be
exposed to these and kind of hit in
the face with them, and have to learn
how to disambiguate
between
all of a sudden all your notebooks, which
you might be used to from OneNote or
things like that, aren't really here in this
view when it comes
to Copilot notebooks, except they kinda can be
in this view, so it gets a little
weird and wonky right from the start. There's
a few different ways to create these notebooks.
The first one, to your point of you
go in I was talking about guest access
with Copilot earlier today. You can go into
a Copilot chat, and you can start a
new Copilot chat and
ask Copilot chat a question. So this is
like that new Microsoft three sixty five experience
we talked about last time where you could
say something like, tell us about the Microsoft
Cloud IT Pro podcast, and it's going to
give you an answer. Right? You're gonna start
having a dialogue with,
Microsoft.
You're gonna start having a dialogue with Copilot
about some topic. And let's say you want
to save that. So in this case, I'm
asking Copilot about Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast,
and it gives me a response about our
website, where to find us in Apple Podcast,
topics covered, all of that. And I want
to elaborate on this more. I want to
save this for later. I now have an
option
at the bottom of a
Copilot
response
to edit in pages,
which is not a notebook yet. It's a
page.
So if I click edit in pages,
it pops up a page that is
created
from
do I say this is created in loop?
Do I say this is a loop page?
Because it sort of is. It's sort of
a loop page, but it's not really like
a loop. It's weird because it's not like
an individual loop component nor is it automatically
part of a loop workspace. So,
yeah, it's got some of the stuff from
loop on it. I the way I've been
thinking about this stuff and trying to wrap
my head around it is
rather than trying to
embrace the chaos of the disparate experience and
trying to figure out, like, does this live
in Loop? Does this live in Copilot? Does
this live in OneNote?
Does this live in SharePoint? Like, is it
a SharePoint page? Like, all these kinds of
things is just saying, like, oh, yeah. It's
a Copilot page. Even even if it might
be a Loop page because I started it
from a Copilot chat and specifically a Copilot
chat
from Copilot,
not a Copilot chat from within a existing
loop page.
But at the same time, when you go
edit this in a page,
it's, like, still a dot loop file. Like,
I can go down in this page because
now I'm in an editing view, and I
can do my slash to get my command,
and I have all my loop stuff, my
table, my bullet list, my task lists
that integrate with Planner,
communication, third party apps. Like, I can do
all the loopy things
in
this page to go edit the response, modify
the response, etcetera.
After I do that, if I want to,
I can go click in the upper right
hand corner on the ellipses and go click
on my options
and add this to a notebook. So I
can start a collection
of pages
in a notebook from here. If I don't
do that, and this is where I'm like,
do I call this a loop page or
not, I can also go to loop and
go to my workspaces where all, like, my
personal
pages are stored. And within
my workspace,
this does show up as a loop page.
So now it's kind of crossed over a
little bit where this loop page or this
Copilot page we're gonna try to stick with
that. This Copilot page does surface itself in
loop, so I can go view it in
Loupe, or I can go add this to
a notebook. And this is one of the
things to me that just starts
adding to the confusion here where I can't
even create a notebook from here. I can
only go in and add it to my
recent notebooks. So if I have a notebook
about the podcast and I wanna add this
response from Copilot to that notebook,
I can do that and start working with
a notebook. It said something went wrong. I
can't add it to my notebooks right now.
But it gives you that ability to start
I would say these notebooks give you the
ability to start a collection of Copilot responses
that are all bundled together
in a Copilot
notebook. I think the reason I would say
call them Copilot pages and not loop pages
is because, one, that's what Microsoft calls them.
Right? So if you go out and look
at the documentation,
you will find articles
like overview of Copilot pages, Copilot notebooks, and
loop workspaces.
You'll find articles like overview of Copilot pages
and Copilot notebooks.
So that branding aspect is there, and I
think
at some point, it becomes kind of forced
memory along the way.
The other thing that you run into is,
like, yes, are Copilot pages really just loop?
Absolutely, they are, but they're loop pages that
don't belong to any workspace.
So,
you know, you end up in this weird
little bit of a conundrum
of
how these things live and where you access
them. So I think that's why it's important
to kind of think about
what was the experience that I started with.
And I think as a user, you might
have to take like a little bit of
a decision here at this point in time
given where the stack is, like, and be
kind of mindful, like, am I starting from
a Copilot chat, which is leading me to
a Copilot page, which is really a Loop
page? But that said, my best experience with
interacting with that page moving forward is not
going to be through Loop, it's gonna be
through Copilot.
And I bet over time as, like, mobile
apps and other things continue to manifest and
grow,
that experience continues to land that way. Like,
I don't know that I see them coming
back point in time and making a decision
to, like, backboard all the loop stuff into
the,
say, like, the Copilot app on Android or
iOS or things like that. It's a little
odd. So I would say that's how you
get a page into a notebook.
The other option you have so that's starting
from chat, but now it's like, well, I
need a notebook to put these pages in.
Right? I'm having a Copilot conversation.
I want to
store these pages in a notebook. Also, in
Microsoft three sixty five, you have that notebook
section. And if you click on notebooks in
your Microsoft three sixty five Copilot,
you'll see a collection of existing notebooks and
also the option to add a new notebook
here. So if you're gonna add a new
notebook, this is where you can start thinking
through, well, what do I want a notebook
about? I want a notebook about our podcast,
or I want a notebook about a particular
SOW for a client.
And this is where it starts for me,
like, getting almost all sorts of confusing is
in that other experience, I'm adding a page
to a notebook. Here, when I go start
a notebook,
I can go give it a name and
just do my new notebook and hit create.
It's gonna create a blank notebook, nothing in
it, so I can start adding chats. Or
on the other hand, I can go pick
a file, not a loop page, not a
loop workspace,
but, like, a Word document
or a OneNote page or an Excel file.
I even have CSV files showing up in
my create a notebook where you actually pick
a file that you want to start
you wanna add to your notebook for additional
context
as you work in that notebook. So if
I pick a Word file and create a
notebook, it adds it as a reference, and
now I have a new notebook. I have
a Word file as a reference,
and then I have another Copilot
chat dialogue in here
to be able to start having conversations.
And it's gonna pull in
a information from that file I added as
I go start having conversations with Copilot
in this notebook.
So
in my head, I almost
as my head tries not to explode, it's
almost like I'm creating a little mini agent
type experience here where I'm starting to pull
resources together, whether it's Copilot chats or files
or even other pages
to create a collection
of reference material for an interaction with Copilot?
Kinda, sorta, but not really. I would discourage
you from thinking about it as an agent.
So agents and declarative agents are a little
bit of a different beast with their ability
to connect to external data sources, maybe like
SAP and HR system, external websites.
Yep. What is common across these experiences is
the ability to
leverage
additional things for additional context, particularly in the
particularly for, like, retrieval augmented generation.
So in this case, you're creating a notebook,
which is basically a container. So you could
have all you could have done this all
in a chat without a notebook as well,
where you could have had a chat and
just reference those multiple files in there. But
I think what you get out of the
notebook experience is the ability to then take
your chats
and rather than persist them as this, like,
massive stream where maybe I've been chatting about
these three documents or whatever for a while,
but start to kinda discreetly pull out bits
and pieces of that, park them in pages,
Copilot pages,
inside your notebook,
and then have all of that as kinda
one stop
shopping, but it's still a little bit weird
because the other thing that you run into
here is, much like with the chat, this
notebook is unique to you. Right? It's in
your user space.
It's ultimately
allocated to, I believe, a SharePoint embedded experience
in the back end where it's like Yeah.
Your loop space, your MyLoop workspace,
your Copilot notebook, and your Copilot pages are
all in a SharePoint embedded container, which is
a user owned container, which is allocated to
you in the life cycle of your user
account or really the life cycle of your
per user entitlement for these experiences
and how they come together.
And that's in contrast, I think, to, like
I said, that chat, which doesn't include really,
like, the multiple page experience. Like, sure, I
could take a chat and start spinning out
components of it to pages, but then I
need a place to park those pages. If
they're all the same, that's a notebook.
And then the other aspect of things when
you think about maybe like a notebook versus
a declarative agent and building one of those
out is you're not grounding this with, like,
additional system context, prompts, instructions, things like that.
It's just a collection, and it's also not
it's also not
immediately shareable. So, like, I can create a
declarative agent, say, like, go park that agent
against a body of knowledge that's already in
a SharePoint site someplace else, whether it's in
my OneDrive, whether it's in a team, SharePoint,
anything like that. Give it all that system
context and instructions for that agent, and then
I can take that agent and share it
out with my organization. I can share it
out with individuals. I can share it with
the team, things like that, and kinda get
them
going along the way. I don't know if
this experience ever turns into that where maybe
now I can start to take my Copilot
notebooks and then share them with end people
and open up permissions
and get some things going there. Like, I
really view these more as, like, the an
extension of the Copilot chat experience
where now I can start to bring together
multiple chats, multiple pieces of information
into what's effectively, like, a private chat for
me that's doing rag against whatever is in
that collection.
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That's the other aspect of these notebooks that
you mentioned too is, like you said about
a Copilot chat where you may go on
and on and have a long conversation. You
don't wanna save all of it. You just
wanna save part of it. You can save
it to the notebook. But then you could
also pull multiple chats into a single notebook.
So as you have three, four, or five
different conversations within Copilot
chat, it does give you a central place
to kind of consolidate all those together. And
I think that's a good way to think
about it is, like, personal consolidation
versus organizational consolidation.
And a lot of that probably comes back
to how you think about like a notebook
as a notebook or
a loop workspace as a loop workspace
is some of those constructs around personal versus
shared and things like that. Like I can
have a OneNote notebook in my OneDrive, and
I can certainly share it with somebody. But
if it was a Team notebook, it's better
to be serviced
and share surface from like a Teams site
or from
an M365 group or a Microsoft
Team, Teams team,
as those things come together. So the other
thing about this I wanna mention, because this
is a part that really threw me at
first when I was starting to play with
this too, is we mentioned the chat. Right?
Like, we could go in and have a
chat, click to edit in pages.
It creates a Loupe page where I can
now go
modify it like I would modify a Loupe
page. It also shows up in Loupe under
my workspaces.
So I'm like, okay. Technically, I can get
to this from both places now. Right? It
well, I created it from Copilot. It's part
of my Copilot notebook. It's really not part
of a workspace. It does show up under
my workspaces and loop. However, once I have
a notebook in here, I have a link
to create a new page. I'm like, okay.
Great. I can go click a new page.
This gives me a loop page. I mean,
it's like the loop interface. I can go
give it a title. I can add an
icon. I can add a cover. This is
my new page in my,
notebook.
Go do whatever I want to in here.
Have conversations with Copilot. There's a Copilot chat
button in it. All the things. Now I
go close it, and my new page is
here in my notebook. However, if I create
a new page within the notebook, it doesn't
show up anywhere in Loupe. It's like just
missing the only place I can find this
page by default
is now in the notebook. So I could
have two or three pages in a notebook,
and based on whether I started it from
within a Copilot chat or based on when
if I started it within the notebook itself,
it shows up in different places.
For me, that was just like I was
like, wait a minute. What's going on here?
I have some of my pages in Loop,
but not all of my pages.
And I really had to dig through that.
And I think that's where like, even in
that title is, like, is it a Loupe
page? Is it a Copilot page? Is really
well, some of these show up in Loupe.
You really want to stick to, I'm doing
Copilot notebooks and pages, so I'm going to
go to Copilot for everything, or I'm doing
loop workspaces
and loop pages, and I'm gonna go to
loop for everything,
stick to one or the other without trying
to wrap your head around
how do these integrate together or can these
integrate together, as well they're both kinda built
on I mean, they're built on the same
technology. Under the covers, it's all fluid loop
stuff. At this point in time, they really
still feel like two very different things. You
have your Copilot construct to it. You have
your loop construct.
Don't try to overlap them. I guess would
be my
advice and guidance there is that's when my
head starts hurting is when I try to
think about, do these integrate together? Do these
work together?
Now they're really two separate things, and it
helps my head a lot.
I think,
yeah,
you have to
as in
all things
Microsoft three sixty five land, especially when they're
newer like this, you have to, I think,
approach them with a little bit of intentionality
and just hopping into
the individual experience versus worrying too much about
the shared one, how that manifests for you.
So
I'd imagine over time,
one would hope, that someone thinks about this
container within a container concept, within the containers
of your SharePoint embedded workspace of, like, oh,
hey. That page that was created in a
notebook, maybe that should be surfaced up to
my loop workspaces or things like that. In
lieu of that, you're right. Like, hey. Just,
like, try not to carry the mental overhead
and the cognitive load.
Like, let's just hop in and do what
we need to do.
But
if you become mindful of it over time,
that lets you start to do some more
interesting things. Because now, let's say you do
start at the top and you're consistently creating
your pages
from Copilot chats or just from Copilot pages
and that experience,
well, those are all gonna show up in
your Loop workspace. And if you recognize that
and you wanted access to them in Loop,
great. Now you're gonna get that on both
sides, right, both sides of the coin there.
The other thing that you'll get is the
ability to now take those pages.
Like one page can go to end notebooks
versus
one page to one notebook, and kind of
pulling those things around with you as well.
So
if it stays in this
model, like, yeah, it's going to take a
little bit, I think, for
users to to wrap their heads around and
get on board with it, but, you know,
you could conceivably build out a workflow around
it today.
You just gotta have, like, all that intentionality
walking into it to be able to get
there and recognize kinda which level of the
pyramid you're at. Am I at the top
level of the pyramid, maybe in, like, a
chat where I landed in
portal.office.com,
which got me redirected over here
to three sixty five dot Microsoft dot cloud
or or whatever it is? Am I at
the next layer of the pyramid? Like, am
I a step down where now I have
Copilot pages and Copilot notebooks, or am I
at the third layer of the pyramid where
I'm actually
in a notebook
and that kind of lower level container
along the way. So if you can wrap
your head around all that, great. Right? Like,
maybe it's something you can embrace and use
as a user that's out there. If you
can't wrap your head around any of that
stuff, like, just don't get frustrated by it.
You gotta live in the experience and think,
like, alright. I'm only gonna ever access stuff
through the Copilot app and not through Copilot
plus Loop or Loop plus Copilot
or, forbid, because these are all just fluid
components at the end of the day, going
out and finding your component
and being able to share it out that
way. I agree a 100%. I think I
mean, the other thing that would be nice
too that I think I was kinda hoping
for is even in Loupe where I have
my meeting notes and my workspaces.
Like, those are two different things. It feels
like we could just add Copilot notebooks
right underneath my workspaces.
Again, I think that helps even from that
cognitive load perspective of, okay. These are notebooks
and these are workspaces. Like, those are two
different things.
Let's separate them out that way versus this
random
page showing up in Loop every once in
a while, which then I think brings us
back to OneNote and that these are also
starting to show up in OneNote, which is
where I mean, I kinda knew these were
out here. I've played with them a little
bit. OneNote, now my notebooks show up, which
this, again, has nothing to do with loop.
You can do loop components in OneNote pages,
but this Copilot notebooks,
when you look at it, it's really just
like an iframe, for lack of a better
way to describe it, into that Copilot notebook
section. So
these Copilot notebooks, again, the notebook things, nothing
to do with Loop. It's these Copilot notebooks
from the Microsoft three sixty five Copilot experience
that are now starting to show up in
a separate
navigation section within OneNote. I will say I
think there's a big difference here
on the
administration side of things. So kinda disconnecting from
the user experience here a little bit, like,
let's kind of take a step back. Like,
you're an admin of a tenant and you
need to get in and manage these out.
They're created as part of a SharePoint embedded
workspace per user.
So when you start to think about, like,
life cycle of an entitlement, life cycle of
a user organization,
these are all private to that user. So
when a user leaves an organization, you can
temporarily reassign that OneDrive to somebody else. And
like one of my team members leaves, I
can get temporarily reassigned their OneDrive, and I
can go in there and get any data
out that I need to, things like that,
if they didn't happen to put it in
a team site. Not so with this stuff.
These are in your embedded collections in SharePoint
embedded, and they're only there for you.
So as users dive more and more into
this individuality,
plus they have
what I would call
very,
very generous quotas on these. They're on the
order of 25 terabytes today, and who knows?
Like, so so
per embedded workspace, like the collection of all
your notebooks, pages,
loop loop workspace, all that, you get 25
terabytes.
That's not an inconsequential
amount of data to be able to all
of a sudden hoard a bunch of stuff
away that is unique to just you, only
you, and only ever you. Yeah. That could
be a whole another discussion. It's just around
storage of where all this stuff starts going
now. I think it's important to keep in
the back of your mind. Like Right. Once
users start going down these paths and doing
these things, like,
the users that find value in this, like
that has to be balanced with
the
value to the business, right, in and of
itself and how that exists. There could be
a bunch of super powerful stuff that you
as an individual can do with a Copilot
notebook and the collection of Copilot pages and
the references that you put it and things
like that, but it's very much a you
experience.
So is there going to be another click
stop where this stuff comes out and it
levels up to, Can I start doing a
Copilot notebook within like
within that M365
group or within that Teams team? Whatever it
happens to be,
maybe, but that stuff doesn't exist today. So
I think you also got to kind of
tread carefully in the early days in how
you direct your users within your organization
to get at all this stuff. Yeah. And
we'll put some links in the show notes.
Like, there's an entire table that Microsoft gives
you on where these different things are stored,
so absolutely have to do that. But I
do have we ran into me trying to
fix audio issues, and I have a meeting
I need to jump to. Alright. Well,
as always, thanks for the time. Yes. Thank
you as well. We might have to come
back to this one as this changes
and evolves over time. But
like we said, definitely go play with this,
spend some time with it, understand it, think
of notebooks and loop as separate things even
though the technology is the same, and let
us know if you have any questions or
any
particular aspects of this you would like us
to dive into further. Great. Thanks, Ben. Thanks,
Scott. We'll talk
to you later. If you enjoyed the podcast,
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If you have any questions you want us
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