The new Microsoft Whiteboard app is now available in preview to the more than 600 million Windows 10 active device and desktop users. It's a new step in blending touch interfaces and social collaboration. Yes, the ability to collaborate by sharing your desktop or work together on various Microsoft documents has become the norm over the last few years. Now, however, the Microsoft Whiteboard app will focus on touch and inking as the primary means of interacting with the app to facilitate easy collaboration among the members of your team. You can even use your finger to write on the screen if your touch based device does not have a pen or digitizer available.
(Of course, keyboard and mouse users can also easily participate in collaboration sessions.)
In the gallery you will find images from setup, first use, and active collaboration with others to see how the new Whiteboard app works from a Windows 10 desktop perspective.
By the way, this service is just a little more than 36 hours old and it is a preview, so expect some hiccups along the way, I certainly experienced a few glitches in my initial testing, but even at this early stage I can see the potential of this app for encouraging increased collaboration in so many ways. However, It is going to be interesting to see the progress of this app since they first showed it off back at BUILD 2017 earlier this year.
Finally, just a couple of logistic related notes:
- In order to collaborate on a whiteboard one of the users must be using an account from an Office 365 subscription. According to Microsoft, that includes Office 365 Home, Personal, and the business level subscriptions.
- For Office 365 users on a business subscription your Administrator must enable Whiteboard access. See our gallery for the steps they must take to turn this feature on for your accounts. This is a global setting and effects all users on your subscription.
- Surface Hub users can use the new Whiteboard App Preview on their Hubs concurrently with the devices current whiteboard app.
- This app is supported on Windows 10 Version 1607, aka the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and higher. It is rolling out and can be located in the Microsoft Store for download.
Let us know how your experience is going with the new app and service. Is this something your company/organization could use to reduce travel costs for teams that are remotely located from each other?
