[Music]
Hello, it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time we're going to have a first look at an app that's been in public preview
for a couple of months called Project Moca.
It's also known as Outlook Spaces and was announced by Microsoft earlier this year.
It's a productivity app that's built into your Office 365 mailbox
and it integrates with many of the other apps like OneDrive and To Do, so let's take a look.
Project Mocha is a module in Outlook on the web.
It's in preview so there's no support from Microsoft.
It's for personal productivity and you open it from your Outlook on the web mailbox
and it runs in the browser and it isn't available for the full outlook client.
Currently this is turned on by changing a mailbox policy using PowerShell so an administrator has to do it
and I'll link to how that's done in the description below.
It can't be controlled in the Office 365 admin centre.
To open the app I'll go to my mailbox from the app launcher in Office 365
and if Project Moca is turned on by script already
you can choose the ellipsis at the bottom of your mailbox and there'll be a link to it.
When you open up that, you land on the start page that shows you a list of templates and your spaces.
The templates include things like weekly plan, project plan and a school plan
and all of these spaces are essentially collections of tasks and information.
You can create a space based on a template or start from scratch with the "new space" button.
If I choose "new space" I can name the space and I'll call mine "project".
I can also add the names of people that are related to the space.
If I type a couple of names in here I'm not actually inviting them to the space because the spaces are for personal productivity only.
I can also add keywords and select a template here too
but I'm just going to leave all this blank for now while we cover the basics
and then later on I'll explain why associating people and adding keywords is useful.
I start my new space with a blank canvas
and the canvas is very similar to Whiteboard in that you're free to move around the space and add things to it wherever you like.
I don't know if it's infinite but I haven't got to the edges of it yet so it's kind of an open world app.
You'll see on the left hand side I have a toolbar and I can add items to the canvas by choosing them
so if I choose "note" it will add a note to the canvas.
I can drag the canvas around and move any of the items that are already in it
and on the right hand side I have a map of the canvas showing me whereabouts I am on it
and I have some zoom controls and I can zoom in and out.
There's also keyboard shortcuts for that too.
I can move far away from the original place as I can and then I can press the "reset" button to just go straight back to it.
I can switch between my spaces at any time by going to the top of the toolbar and pressing the button...
...to show me the list of all my spaces and the home button will take me to the start page.
As we've seen you can add items on their own like this note
or you can have containers called buckets and add items to the buckets.
If I add a goal to this bucket you'll see it snaps into place
and then I can move the bucket around and the goal moves with it
and you can add lots of different items to a bucket.
You can also control what the bucket looks like by changing the color
and you can remove it, and if you do, that will remove all the items that are in it.
There are a number of items you can choose from, most of which are self-explanatory
and many of them integrate with other areas of Office 365.
For example, it has access to the file storage system in OneDrive and in your group-connected SharePoint sites.
I could add a bucket called "files", then I could add files to the bucket.
When I add a file it asks me to pull one from OneDrive or I can search through my groups
which essentially means my group-connected SharePoint sites.
The space also has integration with the Microsoft To Do app.
When I add a task from the toolbar it will automatically add the task to a new list in my To Do app
so I'll add the task onto my canvas and name it,
and if I switch to the To Do app you can see that Moca has created a new list for the space in To Do
and then it adds my new task to it.
The space also integrates with your email.
Over here on the right hand side we have a toolbar that allows you to search for email and events from your mailbox.
If you choose the search button it will take you to the activity bar
and you'll see the messages here are pulled from your mailbox.
You can see them listed here, and you can just drag them onto the canvas
or drop them into a bucket.
It has a tab for messages and events and also a search box where you can look for them by keyword
and this is where the space settings are useful -
if you press this cog which takes you to the settings page
which is the same page you see when you create the space,
you can choose which people are associated with the space
and it suggests email from them that you might want to add to the canvas.
So you just type their name and it will pull them from your organisation's directory.
You can also add keywords that Moca can look for in your mailbox as well.
If I add some keywords here like "cake" and "project",
it will use those to look into my mailbox and suggest email where it finds those keywords.
You can also add email from your inbox to Moca.
If I switch to Outlook on the web I can open up an email, choose the ellipses here
and then choose "add to Project Moca", it will give me a list of my spaces and I can choose one
and it will add the email to the space.
It will show up in the captured list.
I choose the box icon here and it will show me all the emails I've flagged in this way
and I can drag them onto the canvas.
The space also links to your sticky notes.
I can drag a note from the toolbar onto the canvas and I can add the details and formatting
and that note will sync with my sticky notes app.
Finally, let's have a look at the templates.
On the Moca homepage we've got a list of five pre-created templates.
There's no way to add more that I can see.
And if I choose the weekly plan you can see that there's a bucket added for each day
and there's extra items for location, map and a goal.
I can drop items into each of these days to make sure I get the things done
and I can also mix up the items in any way I like
and if I choose the "project plan" template, it adds a bucket for "to do", "progress" and "done",
so it's kind of like a kanban board.
So templates are a really useful way of speeding up the process of getting started with Moca.
I think that Project Moca is an interesting way to organise your personal work.
It seems that flexibility is the main advantage here.
You don't get the structure that an app like Planner gives you, that allows you to group and filter and sort your tasks
but you do get the freedom to add items from different apps and services
and put them wherever you like on the canvas.
I love that massive canvas and the freedom to do that.
That's one of the reasons Whiteboard is so useful
and we have tasks linked to To Do but not Planner, so it's very much about personal productivity
rather than for your work groups.
We can see a little integration to SharePoint which allows us to add files from groups we're a member of
but where Teams is going to fit into this I really don't know.
There's obviously a lot of overlap with the Tasks app for Teams
so it'll be interesting to see whether Moca overlaps or complements that.
Also this might be an example of what to expect from apps based on the new Fluid framework
where you can add items from different apps like we've seen here with To Do tasks and sticky notes,
into a space, update them in the spaces and have them update everywhere else they are.
Please let me know what you think in the comments -
whether this is a smart move by Microsoft or not.
So thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you next time.
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