Too Many Places for Notes: Navigating OneNote, Loop, Copilot, and More with Karinne Diamond Bessette [MVP]

In this episode of the m365.fm podcast, Mirko Peters sits down with Microsoft MVP, educator, technical storyteller, and community leader Karinne Diamond Bessette to explore one of the biggest productivity challenges in the modern workplace: information chaos. Between OneNote, Loop, Teams, Copilot, Planner, Whiteboard, Outlook, and SharePoint, employees today have more places than ever to store ideas, tasks, meeting notes, project updates, and collaborative content. The result? Many organizations struggle to decide where information should actually live and how to keep everything organized, searchable, and actionable.

THE EVOLUTION OF MICROSOFT 365 COLLABORATION

Karinne shares her journey from support engineering and operations into the world of enablement, technical storytelling, and Microsoft 365 advocacy. Her experience helping both technical and non-technical users gives her a unique perspective on how collaboration tools should work in real-world environments. Throughout the episode, she repeatedly emphasizes the importance of translating technology into something humans can actually understand and use effectively. One of the central themes in the discussion is the growing complexity of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. What once started as a productivity suite focused on Word, Excel, and Outlook has evolved into a massive connected collaboration platform with overlapping tools, AI integrations, and constantly changing workflows. Karinne explains that while flexibility is valuable, it also creates a major challenge for users trying to decide where to create notes, how to manage information, and how to avoid duplication.

WHY ONENOTE STILL MATTERS

The conversation dives deeply into the evolution of note-taking itself. Karinne explains how she originally moved from scattered text files on her desktop into OneNote because it allowed her to centralize and search information more effectively. However, she also introduces one of the most memorable quotes of the episode: “OneNote is where notes go to die.” The problem, according to Karinne, is not that OneNote is bad. The issue is that many users capture information inside notebooks but never revisit it, organize it properly, or connect it to actionable workflows. Important ideas often disappear into large personal notebook structures without reminders, visibility, or collaboration.

HOW LOOP IS CHANGING TEAMWORK

This naturally leads into one of the episode’s biggest topics: Microsoft Loop. Karinne explains why Loop has become one of her favorite tools inside the Microsoft ecosystem. She describes Loop as a bridge between email, Teams, tasks, and collaborative content. Rather than creating multiple copies of information across different applications, Loop allows users to maintain a single shared component that stays synchronized everywhere it appears. This creates what she calls a “single source of truth” experience for collaboration. The episode explores several practical use cases where Loop becomes extremely powerful:

• Shared meeting notes
• Collaborative task tracking
• Persistent project updates
• Cross-team coordination

One of the most interesting insights from the discussion is that many organizations are already using Loop without realizing it. Karinne explains how modern Microsoft Teams meeting notes now automatically generate Loop-powered collaborative pages behind the scenes. Instead of meeting notes disappearing inside endless Teams chats, organizations can now maintain persistent collaborative workspaces connected to tasks, updates, and shared action items.

COPILOT PAGES, NOTEBOOKS & AI CONTEXT

The conversation also dives into Microsoft Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks, which Karinne sees as the next evolution of contextual AI collaboration. These tools allow organizations to gather multiple information sources into centralized workspaces that can then ground AI responses against a specific project context. Karinne shares a practical example from a large event project where she combined:

• Emails
• Teams messages
• Planning calls
• Loop pages

into one centralized notebook. She was then able to ask Copilot to generate summaries, identify action items, and surface the most relevant information for her specific responsibilities during the event. Tasks that previously would have required hours of manual review were completed in minutes.

THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH

Another major theme throughout the episode is enterprise search and how AI is fundamentally changing the way organizations retrieve information. Karinne explains that traditional folder structures and file organization are becoming less important because Copilot increasingly understands context, relationships, and semantic meaning rather than relying purely on filenames or locations. She shares an example where she could not manually locate an old PowerPoint presentation but was able to ask Copilot about a presentation tied to a specific event date — and the AI surfaced the correct file almost instantly. This shift toward contextual search represents one of the biggest changes in knowledge management the Microsoft ecosystem has ever seen.

WHY GOVERNANCE & METADATA MATTER MORE THAN EVER

The discussion also highlights the growing importance of metadata, governance, and information hygiene in the AI era. Karinne introduces the concept of “ROT data,” which stands for:

• Redundant
• Obsolete
• Trivial

content that pollutes enterprise systems and weakens AI-generated responses. She explains that organizations now face an urgent challenge: AI systems can only be as trustworthy as the information they are trained or grounded on. If outdated documents, duplicated files, poor metadata, or irrelevant content dominate enterprise storage systems, AI tools may surface inaccurate or misleading information. Because of this, Karinne strongly advocates for better governance practices, including document ownership, lifecycle management, expiration reviews, and relevance monitoring. She also discusses how Microsoft is beginning to introduce mechanisms that reduce the importance of stale or untouched content inside AI-powered search experiences.

ENABLEMENT IS THE MISSING PIECE

Another powerful part of the episode focuses on workplace enablement and digital adoption. Karinne believes organizations need more people acting as translators between technical systems and business users. She explains that technology alone does not create productivity. Companies need internal champions who can guide users, simplify concepts, encourage learning, and help teams understand how tools should actually fit into their daily workflows. The episode highlights how organizations often underestimate the importance of:

• Training
• Adoption programs
• Internal champions
• Learning culture

without realizing these elements are often the real reason technology projects succeed or fail.

AI, CREATIVITY & HUMAN COLLABORATION

The episode also touches on AI creativity, collaboration, and the fear that AI may reduce human thinking. Karinne strongly disagrees with the idea that AI makes people less intelligent. Instead, she sees AI as a brainstorming partner and creative accelerator that can help users refine ideas, organize concepts, and improve communication. She shares examples of using AI to enhance presentation structures, storytelling, and content development while still relying heavily on human expertise and editing. According to Karinne, AI works best when humans stay actively involved in shaping the final outcome.

THE FUTURE OF WORK INSIDE MICROSOFT 365

Toward the end of the conversation, the discussion shifts toward future Microsoft 365 trends. Karinne highlights how Microsoft is increasingly moving toward AI-grounded collaboration, context-aware productivity, integrated workspaces, and agent-driven workflows. She believes the future of work will rely less on manually navigating applications and more on AI systems capable of understanding intent, surfacing context, and orchestrating workflows automatically. The conversation paints a picture of a future where collaboration becomes:

• More contextual
• More intelligent
• More connected
• More AI-assisted

while still requiring strong governance, clean information architecture, and

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