Forum Discussion
Whiteboard app - storage and sharing
- Hi Joost
Not entirely sure of exactly what you're describing.
The current Whiteboard app (that comes with Surface Hub) stores whiteboard data in the user's OneDrive for Business storage. As such it's subject to any tenant region storage controls.
The Whiteboard Preview app that is available from the Store saved the app data in Azure linked to your tenant. Currently the data is stored in the United States, but will expand to other regions when the app goes into production. You can read more about this here: https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app
As far as I can tell there is no anonymous access to Whiteboards.
D
Not entirely sure of exactly what you're describing.
The current Whiteboard app (that comes with Surface Hub) stores whiteboard data in the user's OneDrive for Business storage. As such it's subject to any tenant region storage controls.
The Whiteboard Preview app that is available from the Store saved the app data in Azure linked to your tenant. Currently the data is stored in the United States, but will expand to other regions when the app goes into production. You can read more about this here: https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app
As far as I can tell there is no anonymous access to Whiteboards.
D
I did not find any information on where the Whiteboard files are stored, named or structured. Where and how are those objects stored?
The concept of files, folders, ownership, sharing, copying, deleting,... is well accepted and used. Actually I find it very useful. Can this concept be used for whiteboard objects as well?
Thanks, Thomas
- Hi Thomas. While the concept of files etc. is 'well accepted and used', this does not mean that's the best method for all apps.
Whiteboard has taken a modern app approach, and the physical files are not accessible in a 'traditional' sense. You must access the Whiteboards from within the app, and they can be shared using the built in sharing features.
Files are stored on Azure within your tenant. Naming and structure are not important as Microsoft handles this to work across the organisation.Daniel Hudson Would you care to share the reasoning behind this limitation ? It is awefully restrictive (no copying, versionning, folders, impossible to put with related files...) and seems like small effort large value to implement.
- Just to say, not sure why everyone is @mentioning me in this. I don't work for Microsoft and don't know the technical decisions behind where things are stored. I just know what the app does from using it and it's similarities to other Microsoft apps.
Everyone values different things. The ability to handle whiteboard documents like traditional files (ie with names and controllable storage paths and assignable permissions) would be of immense value to my organization. We have security concerns about cloud storage, but we find the whiteboards tool very useful during teleconference on technical matters. The two biggest issues are that the whiteboards don't have names (or even dates) and that we have to be cautious about what information ends up on the whiteboard since we cannot control the storage of the document (ITAR compliance concerns).
For those reasons we are steering away from Microsoft whiteboard to try other free form collaborative drawing tools.
My colleagues would like to continue our discussion if I'm away for any reasons. How to do that? We did that by storing other "whiteboards" in a folder of TFS, Git, etc. If Microsft Whiteboard document can be shared via Office 365 why not to share via Git, SVN, Google Drive, whatever else of my choose? Anyway, there is a file somewhere 🙂
