Project Moca - A Solution without a Problem?

I’ve been rather complimentary about Microsoft in the past on this blog, and with good reason. The company is a lot more adventurous ever since Satya Nadella took over from the walking train wreck Steve Ballmer in 2014. The Surface Line appears to be going from strength to strength, Xbox has, against all odds, managed to establish a firm place in the games console market, and their business offerings are rock solid. Hell, even the quasi-legendary Microsoft Flight Simulator recently made a comeback. Additionally, Microsoft has also been a lot more experimental recently, as they’ve shown with their new Fluid Framework, which was announced back in 2019. This is the background against which their latest experiment needs to be placed.

Project Moca

What exactly is Project Moca? A Project Management Tool? A Productivity Suite? A tech demo for the Fluid Framework? Some engineer’s quarter-end EVP (Emergency Visibility Project) that somehow got green-lit and released to the public? Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that it was released to Microsoft 365 customers a few months ago, and that I have it available in my own account.

While Outlook Spaces comes with a number of pre-made templates, there is currently no way to add templates of your own.

Getting a bit more serious, Moca, which will apparently be known as Outlook Spaces if and when it gets a proper release, can best be described as a free-form productivity and planning environment that pulls Tasks, Notes, Emails, Calendar Entries and similar stuff together into one single Space, which is what Microsoft calls the different environments within Moca. Upon creating a new Space, you can either use one of the pre-populated templates or create a completely blank slate. The main workspace within these Spaces is a large white canvas, almost like a whiteboard, to which you can add the different Files, Tasks, Notes, Emails and other stuff. You can group them into buckets, move them from one bucket to another, mark any tasks as read or any other kind of stuff. It’s really up to you what you make of it.

While Night Mode is available, Outlook Spaces is still of limited utility in my eyes.

So far, so normal. Now, when you create a new Space, Moca will ask you to add a few Keywords to describe what you’re working on, as well as asking for the email addresses of any collaborators you’ll be working on. It will then show any emails and items pertaining to your project in a special sidebar on the right side of the screen, allowing you to add them to your Spaces, add them to buckets, etc. 

Everyday Use

The interface is spartan, with only two fold-out toolbars. While functionality currently is limited, I have to admit that Outlook Spaces could be quite powerful once its opened up to third-party tools.

As a test run, I used Project Moca to organise my workflow both for this test and for last week’s review of the Withings Thermo. I mean, if I can get it, I might as well take it out for a spin, right? Well, for starters, Moca is currently only available as a web app, either via outlook.com or via a direct link to https://outlook.live.com/spaces/. There are currently no desktop or mobile apps available. In addition, it currently only works with Microsoft products which, while understandable, greatly limits the utility for someone who uses third party task managers such as Todoist. Similarly, it appears as if Moca only supports outlook.com or live.com email addresses, with no apparent support for Gmail, iCloud or other third-party email services. There’s also no apparent integration with Microsoft’s own OneNote, which is particularly galling for a OneNote power user like me. Coming back to the Email integration for a second, that’s something that is of particularly little use for me at the moment, since I’m a bit of a lone wolf when it comes to my blogs, my only collaborator having been my late father. I can see the appeal when it comes to organising a trip or a multi-person project though.

On a bit more of a practical level, the tool is still pretty buggy as well, at least for me. For some reason, I’m unable to move objects out of a bucket or between buckets after having worked with Outlook Spaces for 15-20 minutes. This is only fixable by quitting the app and re-opening it and occurs both on Microsoft Edge and Safari, and naturally has quite a negative effect on the usability of the tool, at least for me.

So, what’s the point?

This is really my biggest question with regards to Outlook Spaces/Project Moca. What is it actually supposed to be? Don’t get me wrong, the concept itself is intriguing, plus I’ll give any such tool a shot if I can get my hands on it. On the whole though, Outlook Spaces feels like a solution in search of a problem. And yes, I use words like problem and will continue to use them. All this customer service Newspeak of “challenges” etc. can go and take a long walk off a short pier, together with any proponents!

That being said however, I can see quite a few use cases when it comes to arranging a family vacation, or indeed just a vacation or trip in general, setting up a Space to collect hotel and flight reservations, emails about meeting up with friends or family, all that kind of stuff. I can see how my parents and I would have used Outlook Spaces for just such a purpose, had it been available a few years earlier. However, with their passing three years ago (has it really been that long already?), that option was never really on the table. 

What remains is the impression that Outlook Spaces in its current form is really just a tech demo. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced their new Fluid Framework, a concept that will see the borders between “conventional” office applications blur, with parts of say Excel tables embedded in emails but still editable with all the functionalities of Excel. A lot of the basic ideas behind the Fluid Framework seem to be at work in Project Moca. It is certainly a very interesting glimpse into Microsoft’s ideas for the future, and while it isn’t really useful for me personally, it is worth keeping an eye on.

There’s just one issue: How the Hell am I supposed to come up with a catchy thumbnail/header for such a vague topic?