What Is Microsoft’s Outlook Spaces? (aka Project Moca)

If you have an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription (O365 or M365), you could have seen a new icon referred to as “Project Moca” in Outlook On the web. Here’s what it is, and how you can use the project management resource.

Undertaking Moca is Microsoft’s identify for a thing that will be named “Outlook Spaces” when formally launched to the community. It’s been offered in the Insider establish of O365 for a minimal while. It is now manufactured it to Preview, which implies that Microsoft is opening up entry to a large amount much more individuals to get responses and gauge user response.

Commonly, an application that gets this considerably will be previewed utilizing its remaining name—Outlook Areas, in this circumstance. When you open up the Task Moca hyperlink, you will even be taken to https://outlook.are living.com/spaces/, but for whatsoever purpose, the company retained the “Project Moca” name.

So, what is it? Very well, Job Moca is a collaboration software for project management. It is portion Planner, component Whiteboard, section Sway, and component one thing new. If you are wondering why Microsoft termed it “Moca,” it seems to be a engage in on “MOCHA,” a venture administration framework.

Not all people will have entry to Venture Moca. To see if you do, log into your O365/M365 account, open up Outlook On-line, and look at the base of the application bar on the remaining-hand side. If you have the Challenge Moca app, it’ll be at the bottom.

When you simply click on the icon for the to start with time, you get to pick out a template or pick out a blank canvas.

Challenge Moca then opens the place settings, where you have to enter a title for your place, but almost everything else is optional.

If you enter the identify of contacts who are involved in your venture that you are functioning on as nicely as keywords, Moca will look for matching e-mail, paperwork, and other documents in your O365 account that you can insert to the canvas. Strike “Create,” and your canvas will be generated.

Relying on what template you selected, you are going to get unique defaults on your canvas. They’ll be named otherwise dependent on the template, but whichever you choose, you will get Kanban columns you can drag e-mails, documents, and jobs into.

These are the identical as buckets that you get in Microsoft Planner. On the appropriate-hand side, there will be an Activity portion which, if you entered contact information or keywords, will automatically be populated with e-mail and calendar events from your Outlook.

There will be other points on the canvas depending on which template you decide on, like milestones, goals, a temperature app, and inbound links to Microsoft queries on a matter.

You can incorporate as lots of factors as you like from the sidebar observed on the left-hand aspect, like responsibilities, hyperlinks, and files.

And, that is about it. The canvas can be as big as you like, so the quantity of matters you can add to it seems very limitless (just like the Whiteboard canvas), although the focus of the application appears to be the buckets of responsibilities (just like Planner) surrounded by any extra details you want to increase (just like Sway).

As Undertaking Moca is nonetheless a preview at the time of writing, it’s missing a ton of what might look useful, this kind of as collaboration and sharing instruments. It is pretty handbook, so you can established up buckets and responsibilities you, and there’s no way to automatically go tasks when you alter their standing, nor does it give you the option to signpost a move with items like arrows or other visible aids. Sure, you could produce your individual pictures and paste them in, but some Visio-design flowcharting selections would unquestionably give such a vast-open up and freeform resource some boundaries and course.

There is also an surprising absence of integration with SharePoint, Electrical power Automate (beforehand Microsoft Flow), and Microsoft Forms, which are generally hooked into anything Microsoft does in 365.

Even so, let’s strain that this is a preview, and Microsoft generally provides a good deal of attributes onto their early apps over time. It’s an intriguing strategy that unquestionably has possible, even if ideal now it does not experience ready for primary time.