Microsoft Sends Moca Boards to the OWA Calendar

Previous Moca Boards Still Available

The July 20 announcement (MC271629) to move Project Moca boards to the OWA calendar board view was not a surprise. Given the dates on Microsoft 365 roadmap item 80213, it seems like Microsoft made the decision in May, soon after rolling out the calendar board view to OWA, which at the time we pointed out seemed like a Moca board (or space, for Moca was also referred to as “Outlook spaces”) tailored for the calendar.

Moca’s Lack of Identity

It’s a sensible call, I don’t think Moca got much traction with customers after Microsoft introduced it as a preview feature in October 2020. A separate component within OWA must have its own identity to stand alongside mail, calendar, people, and tasks. Moca delivered boards onto which people could post a collection of different bits of data, but that’s hardly the same as a fully developed OWA component. I used Moca for a couple of months and then gave up, not least because no mobile client exposed Moca boards (I found a workaround using the To Do mobile client, but it was never satisfactory).

In any case, all the Moca boards created using the preview are now safe and sound and available through the calendar (Figure 1). Everything seems intact, even if some objects appeared to have moved on the board (this could be just me).

The Project Moca icon is still present in OWA’s left-hand navigation rail and opens the Moca page, but I bet this will disappear soon.

Outlook Desktop

For now, only OWA supports the board view. The thought going through my mind is whether Microsoft will use the OCX/WebView2 technology to bring the board view to Outlook desktop as part of their One Outlook initiative, just like they recently did for the Room Finder. It would be logical if they did this to bring boards to Outlook, especially now that the WebView2 runtime component is included with Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise updates. Time will tell.

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