If you have an Office subscription 365 or Microsoft 365 (O365 o M365), you may have noticed a new icon called “Mocha Project” and Outlook Online. This is what it is and how you can use the project management tool.
Project Moca is Microsoft's name for something to be called “Outlook Spaces” when is it officially released to the public. It's been available on the Insider version of O365 for a while. Now you have come to Preview, which means that Microsoft is opening up access to many more people to receive feedback and examine user reaction.
Regularly, an app that goes this far will be previewed with its final name: Outlook Spaces, for this case. When you open the Moca Project link, it will even take you to https://outlook.live.com/spaces/, But for some reason, the company kept the name of "Proyecto Moca".
So what is it? Well, Project Moca is a collaboration tool for project management. It is part Planner, parte Whiteboard, part Sway and part something new. If you're wondering why Microsoft called it “Moca”, seems to be a game “MOCHA”, a project management framework.
Not everyone will have access to the Moca Project. To see if it does, log into your O365 account / M365, abra Outlook onlineand look at the bottom of the app bar on the left side. If you have the Project Moca app, will be at the bottom.
When you click the icon for the first time, you can select a template or choose a blank canvas.
Project Moca subsequently opens the space settings, where you should enter a name for your space, but everything else is optional.
If you enter the name of the contacts who are involved in the project you are working on, as well as keywords, Moca will search for emails, Matching documents and other files in your O365 account that you can add to the canvas. Click on “Create” and your canvas will be generated.
Depending on the template you have selected, you will get different defaults on your canvas. They will be named differently depending on the template, but whichever you choose, you will get Kanban columns that you can drag emails into, documents and tasks.
They are the same as the deposits you get in Microsoft Planner. On the right side, there will be an Activity section that, if you entered contact details or keywords, will auto-populate with emails and calendar events from your Outlook.
There will be other things on the canvas depending on the template you choose, as milestones, objectives, a weather app and links to Microsoft searches on a topic.
You can add as many things as you want from the sidebar on the left side, as homework, links and files.
And that's it. The canvas can be as large as you want, so the amount of stuff you can add seems pretty limitless (just like the blackboard canvas), even though the focus of the application seems to be task groups (in the same way as Planner) surrounded by any additional information you want to add (just like sway).
How Project Moca is still a preview at the time of writing this post, much is missing of what might seem useful, as collaboration and sharing tools. It's very manual, so you can configure buckets and tasks yourself, and there is no way to move tasks automatically when their status changes, nor does it give you the option of signaling a flow with things like arrows or other visual aids. Of course, you can create your own images and paste them, but some Visio-style flowchart options would definitely give such an open and freeform tool some limits and direction.
Also there is an unexpected lack of integration with SharePoint, Power Automate (previously Microsoft Flow) and Microsoft Forms, that are regularly linked to everything Microsoft does in 365.
Despite this, let's emphasize that this is a preview, and Microsoft generally adds many features to its early applications over time. It's an interesting idea that certainly has potential, even if you don't feel ready for prime time right now.
