Microsoft Project MoCa – A Jasparrow Point of View

PROJECT MoCa  – Overview

“Project Moca” which is also known as “Outlook Spaces” is new a solution built in sides of Office 365 exchange online mailboxes. Moca is basically a personal space provided within outlook web app through which user create/manage/link their various workloads in a single dashboard.

In Moca a user can create multiple space and inside each space user can have multiple buckets to store various workloads such as notes, links, goals, files, events , emails, locations, Contacts, etc.,

• Admin Provision MoCa through PowerShell
• User Can access MoCa through Outlook Web App
• There are no limitation for No. of space at-present in MoCa
• Each workspace has a flexible canvas so users can customize and view the content their way.
• Multiple Buckets can be created that acts as containers within space to hold the workloads
• At present workloads such as – Notes, Goals, Emails, Events, Locations, Contacts, Goals, Weather, Task are available to collaborate
• The workloads are available across M365
• MoCa uses Exchange Online mailboxes as data store.

License & Subscription

Project Moca is available for Microsoft 365 consumer subscribers, commercial customers, and EDU customers as a preview and is shipped disabled by-default.

Enabling Project Moca

Project Moca is enabled through OWA mailbox policy – Please follow the below steps to enable Project MoCa for the relevant users.

1. Connect to Exchange Online > 2. Get the relevant OWA mailbox policy > 3. Enable Moca for the OWA mailbox policy

Sample Use Case – Traveler Planner

Conclusion

No Doubt, solutions in M365 are so much collaborative and user friendly – in history of M365 there were lot of solutions launched focused to enhance the experience of the user and overall productivity of the organization. Project MoCa is one of them but a different kind! – So far there were lot of solutions Microsoft launched to centrally manage, search, collaborate, etc., But there were no Central, as well as personal Space for a user to manage his own information from different sources, application across M365 – and organize in the way he want. To the best of our knowledge Project MoCa is first of its kind using which a user can centrally manage multiple workloads from various applications under single roof or dashboard.

This solution shows similarity of cosmos & galaxies in space – in other words, each user gets a cosmos(Moca) in which they can create multiple galaxies (spaces) – and with each galaxies a user can have multiple solar system (Buckets) to hold various types of workloads. From our point of view this a first step in providing user his own space / dashboard to mange projects & workloads centrally but not the final.

We are aware that there are lot many features on the way that are currently missing – such as a whiteboard, more planner capabilities, ability to edit within space, sharing of workspace, etc., From a product knowledge perspective, we are  looking forward, Microsoft to release more information around security, compliance, eDiscovery, limitations, retentions, etc.,

Our recommendation on deploying Preview version of MoCa : We recommend organization to perform Proof of Concept to validate the Functional, security & compliance side of the solution at this preview stage. Financial organizations, companies who’s foot-prints are across globe / adhere multi-national law of land & compliance are requested to stick only with POC and stand-by for more updates & additional product documentation from Microsoft.