By Sam Orlando, Automation Engineer at Umbrella Managed Systems
If your team is looking for ways to collaborate and share ideas, but don’t want to spend a lot of money on project management software, then you’re in luck. Microsoft will be pushing out a new app that will be standard with Windows 10 and available on the Microsoft Store. The application is simply called Whiteboard.
Microsoft Whiteboard
Whiteboard is just that; a canvas upon which you can share content and ideas. You can get a preview of Whiteboard now in the MS Store, but it will soon be part of an update for Windows 10 users.
If your business is using Microsoft’s Office 365 for Business, then you will have more collaborative tool options available in Whiteboard to aid in planning and sharing drawings, notes, pictures, documents, links, and even live camera feeds, all in real time. Office 365 domains can allow their users to log into Whiteboard using their O365 account and share their Whiteboard with other members in your domain.
In my first experience with Whiteboard, I loved the flexibility of being able to draw out ideas and share them with someone who can then add/adjust the same image at the same time. The only real con is that writing text with a mouse is difficult. This would be better suited for a digital pen, especially with a tablet so you can write directly on the screen with a stylus. Still, you can add text notes and still be able to type text with a keyboard; it’s not totally reliant on freehand writing.
Video
One of the cooler features is the ability to add a web camera to show live video on the white board. Whether to be used as part of the content or simply to give a face to the pen on the other end. (The gamer in me is thinking of ways we can use Whiteboards to have drawing wars, or play Whiteboard Charades.)
My hope is that they include Whiteboard as an option for use with MS Teams. It would be powerful to be able to add Whiteboards to Team Hubs where teams are already communicating together.
This new tool provides everyone the freedom to share ideas in more ways than just words. Why describe it with text, when you can draw it, show pictures, and add video via web links, etc?
P.S. Did I mention that Whiteboard is free?
