
Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows - Ours90
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Microsoft-Whiteboard-is-now-generally-available-for-Windows/ba-p/214574
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ghaff
Effective distributed whiteboarding, etc. is something that the tech industry
has been dithering with for decades and nothing has ever seemed to quite
click. It feels that, with relatively inexpensive tablets [ADDED: and almost
affordable big screen touchscreens], maybe we'll actually converge on
something interesting.

~~~
neves
Surface Pro looks really cool: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/surface/business/surface-hub...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/surface/business/surface-hub-2)

Sometime ago I've read that its success was a surprise and the demand was
greater than MS could produce. Is it really good?

~~~
froindt
I work for an international manufacturer. We're deploying Surface Hubs to all
locations that have a good enough internet connection. I've only used it a
couple times as a glorified whiteboard and had a good experience.

Apparently it has some very good microphones and software running. Regardless
of where a person is in the room, it will adjust the microphone level so you
can hear them clearly. The people training mentioned their location has had a
couple instances where a little side conversation was broadcast to the other
side. They made sure to mention that in _every_ training session.

~~~
iofiiiiiiiii
I thought it was a gimmick like the rest but this and other comments here seem
to indicate there might be something to it. How much does it cost?

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. We just announced Surface Hub 2, more
details (and video) here: [https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2018/05/15/meet-
surface-hu...](https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2018/05/15/meet-surface-
hub-2/)

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nickjj
I really wish you could use this app without signing in to a MS account (and
just use it offline).

Does anyone know of a good alternative app that gives you an easy to use
whiteboard that works offline?

Edit: Before anyone says "paint"... The paint app creates very harsh and
blocky lines with all of its brush tools and photoshop is massive overkill.

The "ink workspaces" are almost perfect but not quite. The sketch app only
runs in full screen which is a pretty big limitation.

~~~
freeone3000
OneNote has a similar drawing tool set. Paint3D's a bit different but is also
close. The main draw of Whiteboard is the collaboration aspect.

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DIVx0
I really wish we could use Surface Hubs or this new whiteboard product at my
company. We're a huge global enterprise and many development teams are split
across boarders. It is very difficult to convey complicated technical work
over a conference call or to whip out a visio type diagram on the fly.

We're heavy cisco users and are using Webex Teams (formally cisco spark) along
with Cisco Spark boards. It's cool that it can work on any number of devices
but the UX is far inferior to MS Surface Hub. Even with the bad UX these tools
have been helpful.

These tools are expensive but they have paid for themselves many times over on
time/travel savings.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
I share your frustration.

In my team, I estimate the cost of these boards are equivalent to the cost of
about 3 face-to-face meetings of my team.

I think there's also a productivity / opportunity cost from only being able to
share a whiteboard (real or virtual) during these occasional f2f meetings.

So it drives me a little nuts that management doesn't invest in this more, and
treat team communications in general as a first-order problem.

I've been around long enough to know there can be factors I'm unaware of that
management must consider, so I'm not assuming they're being irrational. I just
don't know either way.

(I know there are other pros and cons for f2f meetings, making a purely
monetary comparison incomplete.)

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. I've heard first-hand stories from some
early Whiteboard Preview folks at enterprises that used our product to cut
down on travel & accommodation expenses, while maintaining the same level of
fidelity/interaction that f2f meetings gave them, when doing things like
technical sales meetings.

We're seeing many enterprises starting to see the benefits & the economics
just simply make sense with the decreasing cost curves of large panel
displays, and the increasing quality of interactive touch/ink panels.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Thanks for the data point.

One of the challenges at my workplace is that these devices are currently so
large and expensive that it's only practical to install them in some of our
meeting rooms. But with heavy competition for meeting rooms, depending on
these boards for routine meetings (e.g. daily standups) gets dicey.

So for us, they might become practical only when the price comes down enough
for them to be ubiquitous, readily available, and (hopefully) on mobile
stands.

In the meantime, we're looking into alternatives involving devices small
enough that every developer can have them on his/her desktop, and put them
away when not in use.

Microsoft seems to have some nice offerings in both form factors, but as a
mixed Mac/Windows shop, MS-only solutions won't work. We need something that
can be entirely hosted behind our firewall _and_ has good clients for Mac,
Windows, and (ideally) Linux.

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walterbell
If you want local-only collaborative drawing with iPads and Apple TV, Inko
costs $20, [https://medium.com/@creaceed/drawing-together-behind-the-
sce...](https://medium.com/@creaceed/drawing-together-behind-the-
scenes-a7a0352ab7e4) & [https://creaceed.com/inko](https://creaceed.com/inko)

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mattlondon
We've had JamBoards with GSuite for a while. They're cool to play with, but
once the novelty wears off no one really seems to use them any more and they
collect dust in the corner of the meeting rooms.

Anyone actually using these things frequently, or see anyone else actually use
them?

I've never seen any meetings where people just draw out pictures of rabbits or
trivially simple flow-charts and call it day...

~~~
nickspag
Yea, we have the hubs at our office and use this. It’s great for collaborative
diagramming.

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. The other thing I'll note is we see a
general trend of most information workers jobs in the next few years calling
for more creative work, so the need for these type of solutions will continue
to grow--even if it doesn't seem vital in your role today, you may be
surprised to look back at how your job's day-to-day has changed 5 years from
now.

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giancarlostoro
Saw this sometime back before the Surface Go was announced, and once that
announcement was made it made a lot more sense for me. I have not yet fully
tried it though. I am waiting to get a Surface Pen to see just how good those
things can be on a Surface Book 2. I do like the idea of digital notes that I
can 'scribble' myself.

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kojoru
Compare that app + Surface Hub to Google Jamboard [1] which is a single-
purpose 4k TV capable of only fulfilling this use case and costing $5k +
$600/year.

1 -
[https://gsuite.google.com/products/jamboard/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/jamboard/)

~~~
Eridrus
A Surface Hub is $9K though, so not sure why you're bringing up cost here.

~~~
DiabloD3
The Hub is an actual complete Surface PC. $9k is ridiculous, but it is more
than just a whiteboard.

~~~
endorphone
But in that case you don't want more than a white board. There are many cases,
especially in the corporate world, where you want a single-purpose device that
isn't going to need maintenance, group policies, etc etc.

~~~
zamadatix
Buying a device without "group policies, etc etc" doesn't mean you don't still
need to implement them.

Damn I wish our company would stop buying Alexa/Home/Chromecast/Sonos/IoT-box-
from-down-the-street.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
One of the best ideas I ever had was getting a completely separate network
connection for our guest WiFi. It was trivial to implement, keeps our diagrams
and GRC needs simple, and we no longer have to worry when a PHB wants an IOT
lightbulb that'll no doubt get hacked in 24 months.

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amarant
so basically multiplayer MS paint? heck, it's a good idea!

~~~
tjoff
Microsoft NetMeeting had that in the 90s, I remember it quite fondly.

~~~
52-6F-62
It excited me as a kid haha. Between that and Comic Chat, and V-Chat I was
convinced the future was _now_.

I kind of wish Comic Chat still existed (though everyone should be blaming it
for Comic Sans)

~~~
ygra
Wasn't Comic Sans created for Microsoft Bob?

~~~
catdog
It was but it never made it into Bob because they did not manage to get it
ready in time.

~~~
BigChiefSmokem
I'm having a hard time picturing exactly what could be so hard about getting
Comic Sans "ready" in time.

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youdontknowtho
Ink to shape and ink to table are interesting. Collaborating with people using
this thing might be useful.

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Ink to shape and ink to table are two
early examples of how we're infusing intelligence into the Whiteboard's
canvas. We want to start showing people the power of the pen (or your
finger/mouse if you're inking that way!) and how many things you think are
difficult to do (e.g. drawing perfect shapes) or multi-step UI things (e.g.
inserting a table with X rows and Y columns from a ribbon menu) can be more
naturally done by simply drawing them.

This is just the beginning, but you can imagine many more examples going down
this road that will unlock a ton more value in the core "ideation" scenario in
which Whiteboard lives.

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megaman22
Looks exactly like they pulled out the whiteboarding from Lync/Skype for
Business and made it stand-alone...

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. It's actually a completely different
stack/app, and has a lot of focus on making the real-time collab, intelligent
inking (shape & table recognition) and canvas much richer (sticky notes, alt-
text for accessibility, Bing image search with ink, GDPR compliant, multi-
touch ruler for straight lines, rainbow/galaxy ink for pure fun during boring
meetings...)

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dgudkov
Putting interactive analytics (dashboards) on this thing would be really cool
for meetings.

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Very curious to learn more. Any particular
use cases / dashboards that immediately come to mind?

~~~
dgudkov
Hi Ian,

I'm not sure to what degree PowerBI is touch-screen friendly, but I dealt a
lot with Qlik Sense (another BI / dashboarding platform) and it's quite touch-
screen friendly -- filtering, selections, drilling down, etc. because its UI
was designed for tablets.

What I was missing sometimes is the ability to easily put a dashboard on a
large screen (like the Whiteboard) during a meeting in order to answer
questions that arise during meetings -- what the last week looks like, what
region had best sales, what products did they sell most of all, etc. Because
of the visual UI, data can be queried and explored right from a dashboard.

Yes, a dashboard could be just screen-shared from a laptop, but that would be
a one-man show. Sharing it on the Whiteboard would let anyone near the screen
to support their points by bringing up relevant analytics.

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Angostura
That sentence at the end is odd - does it mean that the iOS app will be paid
for?

> Microsoft Whiteboard is available as an app for all users on Windows 10
> devices. For commercial users, the Whiteboard app will be coming soon to iOS

~~~
extra88
Based on the other footnote, I think the reference to "commercial users" is
drawing a distinction between business Office 365 users (i.e. their own
instance with a custom domain) and personal Office 365 users:

> Whiteboard currently supports collaboration within Office 365 tenants for
> commercial customers, and across personal accounts for customers with a
> Microsoft account. Collaboration across multiple Office 365 tenants is
> planned for future release.

If I'm right, anyone will be able to download the iOS Whiteboard app but only
login if they have a business account.

~~~
haslfkjhakj
No, anyone can login. What they're saying is, O365 Commercial Users [companies
using O365, not personal accounts] can only collaborate with other O365
Commercial users, while Personal users can collaborate with other personal
users.

Cross-collaboration [so, xyz@company.com collaborating with abc@outlook.com]
will come later.

~~~
extra88
I was responding to the question asking if the iOS app will have to be paid
for. Personal users may be able to collaborate but based on the other
footnote, not through the iOS app.

~~~
Angostura
Thank you both. Thst's helpful.

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aktive0
Any mention of whiteboard + vr or alternative? Infinite whiteboard in VR is
the killer app that would make me dust off my Oculus go again.

~~~
IanMikutel
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Would <3 to know how you'd want to use
Whiteboard in VR...tell me more?

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amelius
Great, a communication tool that works on a single platform!

/s

~~~
ductionist
It’s coming soon for iOS and web, too.

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Wheaties466
Useless for me. I'm not willing to sign up for a microsoft account to use a
glorified mspaint.

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acemv
This is great, and I am happy Microsoft has put forth a great product to
fulfill collaborative white boarding on their platform. Microsoft has been
supporting of digital convas technology for a long time, which was finally
streamline in the inkcanvas control in WPF over a decade ago.

This solution from Microsoft has been floating around the education sector for
sometime already by Dyknow, a small company HQ'd in Indiana. Curious if this
firm's tech was bought out or just copied.

