Microsoft Whiteboard now available for the web and integrated in Teams

[Itai Almog]

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Whiteboard for the web and integration with Teams meetings, releases that continue our journey to enable people to ideate and create from any device, anywhere. 

Easily collaborate with others or access your boards from any device

Today we’re making Microsoft Whiteboard for the web available for all commercial Office customers. It is available on the all apps list under office.com or directly at whiteboard.microsoft.com. We believe that the best results come when everyone participates and this release makes Whiteboard available on all your organization, school or employee devices including PCs, tablets and phones running Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android. Whiteboard for the web provides the ability to collaborate in real-time with others as well as access your existing boards. Whiteboard for the web is an important part of the Whiteboard family of clients as it makes Whiteboard available on all devices and in Teams. We are starting from an experience that is focused on real-time inking but are committed to bringing additional functionality from our native apps over time.

 

Run effective Teams meetings with Whiteboard

We are excited to bring Whiteboard to Teams meetings. Customers can now easily add a whiteboard to any Teams meeting by clicking on Whiteboard under the Share option. The newly created whiteboard will be automatically shared with all meeting participants and available for them to start collaborating without leaving the Teams experience. A new Whiteboard tab will also be added to the meeting to make is easy to access the board after the meeting.
Adding a Whiteboard to a Teams meeting is useful for a variety of scenarios such as diagramming collaboratively, expressing ideas, capturing agenda items and follow ups, remote training, and more. We can’t wait to learn how your organization will be using Whiteboard in meetings. Please share your stories below.

[JBelliveau]

Hi,

According to the 365 roadmap for Whiteboard https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Whiteboard , I see 0 items in development.   How can we be assured that the feature rich web version is in development and slated to roll out later this year? 

Thanks!

[Jasmin_Rashid]

@JBelliveau Thank you for reaching out - the 0365 roadmap for Whiteboard is currently being worked on to reflect our plan for the development of the Web app for later this year. We hope to have this updated very soon :)

Jasmin Rashid, Microsoft 

[Jasmin_Rashid]

@prajwaln - Thank you for sharing your current scenario - I will connect with you offline to try and help further :)

Jasmin Rashid, Microsoft 

[JMP1986]

I just want to echo alot of the comments on here. The browser version of Whiteboard needs significant expansion of its functionality. 

As a lecturer most of my students access their IT resources through the Web Browser versions of Office 365 and Teams, on a huge variety of devices. 

I would like to see functionality built into other platforms such as Padlet which makes it easy to embed audio, video, live recorded video, pictures. Until it has these features on the web version I see limited use of it within real teaching institutions. It would be nice if it integrated into the education side of Teams so you could add it to the ribbon menu and your students could access the whiteboards from there, or make them embeddable into Class Notebook as a live whiteboard.

[Ian Mikutel]

@JMP1986 We hear you and we're doing a lot behind the scenes to improve Whiteboard on the web. We announced this week that Whiteboard Web (and in Teams) will soon be updated with new features including faster much load times, sticky notes, text, and drag and drop capabilities. These features enable team members who don’t have access to a touchscreen or Surface Hub to participate in whiteboarding sessions. This is simply the beginning, and much of what you mention around richer tools and integrations in Teams are under exploration. We appreciate your continued feedback!

[LCrowe515]

@Jasmin_Rashid Regarding the acceleration of Mac OS capability, will this also include the ability to use Whiteboard in MS Teams on the Mac OS version of the Teams App?  My organisation uses Teams, and for our Mac users, the web version of Whiteboard is less than ideal for collaborating through Teams meetings.

[Gmattis]

I'm looking to update our company procedures around using Whiteboard in meetings. We are currently using Teams for many meetings and using Whiteboard can be very effective especially for ideation. We still need to take meeting notes to ensure effective communication especially with team members that were not able to attend or upper management etc... I'm looking for an improved workflow that integrates this need for effective meeting notes.

The current notes feature within Whiteboard allow for a little too much freedom with meeting notes. We are very open to suggestions but believe more structure is needed. Something like OneNote works better for the notes but adding another software and needing to copy and paste clips into it is not that effective especially since really only a link can be provided to the whole Whiteboard. It would be more effective if we can select items in Whiteboard and copy with a link back to those items so when the picture is clicked on in OneNote it will launch Whiteboard and zoom to the items. Maybe I'm missing something that is self apparent within Whiteboard or Teams. Maybe the new Lists will add the functionality we are looking for?

[Jasmin_Rashid]

@LCrowe515 Thank you for reaching out!. Indeed our plan is for Mac users to access Whiteboard through the Web/Teams app and have a more comparable experience to that of the native app capabilities once the new Web app is launched soon :)

Jasmin Rashid, Microsoft 

[recepsahin1972]

very good application

[mawhite]

With the enhancements you're looking to make for the browser version to bring it to parity with the apps, will you also be including the ability to change post-it note colors, as well as "like" notes? 

[sturgman]

Are there any updates on Microsoft Whiteboard in general? Is the product going to be discontinued? It has almost been a year since this update. Offline usage, general lag with a lot of Whiteboards are still issues.

It is a fantastic product in terms of what it does but it is extremely cumbersome to use for a heavy workflow.

[ZoeRenodzoe67]

trying whiteboard

[Asascuach2]

I love that! You have very positive comments. 

[Asascuach2]

Does MS Whiteboard have Links? Can you make slideshows on it? I am new to MS Whiteboards.

[Prisha2355]

Good it helped me a lot thanks 

[Prisha2355]

Thanks 

[catherine750]

ok

[catherine750]

i like it

[Andre39]

Will guest access to the whiteboard still be available this year?

[alleghenyhealthchoices]

can multiple users upload photos to whiteboard?

[Bob_Taylor]

I was not sure where to post this, so I apologize if this is in the wrong place. I am assuming that a shared Whiteboard will go away if the user leave the company and we close the account. Is there a way, like in Forms, to make the whiteboard a group board? Does anyone know if there is a way to reassign an owner to a Whiteboard? Thanks in advance for any info. 

[faithallington]

@alleghenyhealthchoices Hi, you can upload photos to Whiteboard using our Windows 10 and iOS apps, and coming soon to our web and Teams experiences.

[faithallington]

@Andre39 Hi, guest access is still in progress, we'll be updating the roadmap soon.

[faithallington]

@sturgman Hi, thank you for the feedback - we've been hard at work on performance and new features. For the web and in Teams, we've recently shipped new sticky note colors, text colors, resize and rotate, improved selection and we have quite a few more things coming in the next month. 

[faithallington]

@Bob_Taylor shared whiteboards will remain available but any private/unshared whiteboards will be deleted. We recommend that as part of someone leaving the company, you run our PSH cmdlets to transfer ownership of their boards to another person, such as their manager. The documentation is available here MicrosoftWhiteboardAdmin Module | Microsoft Docs

[Jen_Unser]

Hi @Jasmin_Rashid - are there any further updates on when native DLP tools will be available for MS Whiteboard? I just checked the roadmap site and still don't see anything listed regarding this item. Thanks! 

[Ian Mikutel]

@Jen_Unser DLP will be coming once we move to SharePoint storage, which is scheduled for CY21 Q3. We’ll share more details once we have a confirmed date for the DLP portion.

[salihzett]

@Itai Almog @Ian Mikutel 

When we will get the public features also in the web version? So adding Kanban boards or other templates? Or just adding a picture?

Whats about a native app for macos? the access from teams is limited.

Or is Microsoft Whiteboard dead?

[Vaishnavi_yadav]

[Star_D]

@Ian Mikutel , Isn't it Q3 CY21 now? 
I still don't see DLP (or even SharePoint storage) in the Whiteboard Roadmap at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=1&filters=Whiteboard

Really looking forward to both of those features:

1. DLP - Our security team may have us disable whiteboard w/o DLP.
2. SharePoint Storage - It would be consistent if a Team's channel whiteboards are stored in the Team's SharePoint like other channel files/resources.

[Jen_Unser]

@Ian Mikutel - I just checked the whiteboard roadmap link Star_D provided above, and still don't see an item listed regarding DLP. Any update you can provide us regarding anticipated availability? Can it be added as a roadmap item, so we can point our Security folks to it as a remediation that's in-process w/Microsoft? Thanks! 

[OashDave]

MS Whiteboard looks different today. Up date? Panic has set in just before I start work. I can't import pdfs in the new MS Whiteboard - can it be done? Or is there a way to use the previous version? Help!!

[JBelliveau]

Wow, the new update is totally unusable for us.  I have a frequently used huddle board that utilized the task lists and the note drag/drop feature between grids.  Neither of those features work any longer.  Can someone from Microsoft confirm that these features are gone from Whiteboard now, or are these bugs?  If gone, I will need to find another product ASAP.  

I'd like to post an update my comment above - maybe it will help someone else.  My team was using the desktop version of Whiteboard and that's where drag/drop of notes was not working.  I learned that using Whiteboard via a Teams meeting still allows drag/drop of notes between grids, but the checklists are gone altogether.

Good luck!

[OashDave]

My Surface pro has today suddenly  spontaneously updated MS Whiteboard without warning or design on my part. It appears to be running a new version of MS Whiteboard that looks and feels v different -like a cut down but more colourful version? However alas it now has less functionality in key areas. e.g. I need to import pdf files to the Whiteboard which hitherto I've been able to do and annotate at will. & I can no longer highlight text? These functions have disappeared?

Do I now have the "Web App" instead of the "Win 10" version? I would dearly love to revert to my former if so, indeed my work productivity relies on the old MS Whiteboard functions.

Can anyone please help me back to the old version?

[Star_D]

Any word on DLP?

Also, I tried for months to use the Whiteboard Module in PS & finally opened a support case, where I was told that it doesn't work in GCC.  It would be nice if the documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/whiteboard/?view=whiteboard-ps was updated to list which environments it applies to.

[Jen_Unser]

STILL WAITING on a response for native DLP. The Whiteboard roadmap doesn't list it at all. Please let us know if there's an update!!

[MGodthelp]

Hi @Jasmin_Rashid , 

I would also love to see ways to either embed a single whiteboard or just the whole Whiteboard experience like we have in the Web-based version.

Are there any plans to support this in the near future so our users are able to use it directly from our digital workspace solution and not have to a separate browser tab or app?

Kind regards,

Mark

[sameslom7112]

Can you use the whiteboard with the family subscription?