I was super excited when I saw the under the wraps beta for Outlook Spaces earlier in february 2020, when on twitter WalkingCat described the existence of the new app. I had a chance to play with it and we featured it on our #Office365Distilled podcast, so did Luise Freese here and Ragnar Heil here. Great news, as it is now available for public preview under the codename “Project Moca”.
This Padlet alternative from Microsoft, now known under the codename “Project Moca”, is set up as a pin board that you can use to pin tasks, emails, calendar items and much more on a visual board. It comes with a bunch of build in templates like a project plan, a week plan, but also personal boards like a meal planner or personal wellness.
It has been quiet for some time around it with no talk or presence at MS Ignite 2020. Or so I thought. A few days ago I found this blogpost, stating that Project Moca now available for public preview.
Turning on Project Moca
It is turned off by default, and you will need a bit of powershell to turn it on:
Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
$UserCredential = Get-Credential
Connect-ExchangeOnline -Credential $UserCredential
Set-OwaMailboxPolicy OwaMailboxPolicy-Default -ProjectMocaEnabled $true
This code imports the Exchange Management library (which you need to download and install first), then asks for your credentials and connects.
The last bit is to set the mailbox policy to have Project Moca enabled.
After you did this, give it a few hours to actually manifest itself. After that, you can find it via your Outlook web or through this link: https://outlook.office.com/spaces/.
Wrap up
I am very excited to see where this new app will take us, as I love the fact that I can visually pin items around my project or week onto a board, with sticky notes, tasks, emails and calendar items to pop up and show me the status and what needs to be done.
Test it out, see what you can do with it. And of course let me know what you think of it, what use cases you see coming from this.
