Microsoft Whiteboard

Maker

Hey PH, Ian from Whiteboard here! We're so pumped to announce Microsoft Whiteboard for iOS and a Preview of our web app today! I've been on Microsoft's Whiteboard journey for a couple years now, and it's exciting to see how far we've come. Originally built for the Surface Hub large screen devices (and just demoed at Microsoft Ignite on the Surface Hub 2), we saw so much engagement & excitement, we decided to put a lot more effort behind it and extend it to more users across devices and platforms. We previously announced a Win10 app this summer, and today we have a iOS app and a preview of our Web app. We believe its critical to enable a bunch of platforms to come together on the same whiteboard, since many of you work in mixed device environments where collaboration needs to take place, regardless of the device you happen to be using. That's our mission! Let us know what you think! :)

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6yr ago

André Meyer

@ianmikutel great work Ian & team, thank you! What are the plans to integrate Whiteboard into the Microsoft ecosystem, e.g. Teams, Office 365 (contacts, etc.). And how does it extend/compete/integrate with OneNote?

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6yr ago

Ian Mikutel

Microsoft Whiteboard

Maker

@casaout André first off, thanks for using & enjoying Whiteboard on Win10! Would love to understand your scenarios/use cases more too to help us refine the product further. To answer your question, I'm actively working on Teams integrations with Whiteboard as we speak. Other folks on my team are working with the rest of Office to figure out the best integrations. Our long-term vision is Whiteboard can be the easiest, most approachable place for much of our creative work of the future can begin, and we'll make it super easy for you to take that rough storming/forming from Whiteboard "downstream" into the rest of Office to polish it up (e.g. a deck in PowerPoint), calculate (e.g. a spreadsheet in Excel), write out details (e.g. a doc in Word), etc.

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6yr ago

André Meyer

@ianmikutel Thanks a lot for your reply, Ian! It's great to here you are already working on integrations. I think that the vision you describe makes a lot of sense - i.e. brainstorming/rough ideas for Whiteboard; and then for documenting/etc we use OneNote (or Word, PPT, etc.). The company I work in is a really heavy OneNote-user, but real-time collaboration can be a bit tough - which is what Whiteboard does a lot better. Maybe also a simple way to export drawings/note to OneNote (not just as a picture, but the actual) drawings could be cool. I.e., after brainstorming and outlining ideas, I want to document them in OneNote. Atm, I mostly use Whiteboard during Skype/Teams calls when we are working on design/dev prototypes to discuss workflows, processes, etc. We are eagerly waiting for the web version, since not everyone is on Windows. (Finally, maybe at some point Whiteboard could replace the Windows 10 inking drawboard-thingy)

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6yr ago

Trevin Chow

Tally: Sports Predictions

@ianmikutel cool app, I’ve been playing with it and think it may be useful. One piece of initial feedback is on the text size of your menus. Why is it so small? Example is even on first run with the Microsoft account sign in modal. There’s no way this text is accessible, is it?

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6yr ago

Ian Mikutel

Microsoft Whiteboard

Maker

@trevin Thanks for testing! We were optimizing for small screen devices and giving users as much of the canvas for their ideas to grow as possible...but we're already on making it larger/easier to use in a future update. 😃

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6yr ago

André Meyer

I have been using MS Whiteboard on Windows 10 for a while and love the simplicity & speed. Today, it got a whole lot more useful, since it's available for iOS and (soon) the web. A collaborative app needs to be available everywhere. ;)

The only thing I miss is a tighter integration into the Microsoft ecosystem. I.e. into Teams, OneNote, my contacts, etc

Pros:

finally ready on more platforms

Cons:

integration into existing MS tools missing

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6yr ago