Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows
techcommunity.microsoft.com
techcommunity.microsoft.com
For example, I haven't tried anything for whiteboarding recently but a number of my standing conference calls use Google Docs to dynamically add notes, action items, etc. in realtime and that works pretty well for a lot of things.
Sometime ago I've read that its success was a surprise and the demand was greater than MS could produce. Is it really good?
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.
That's awesome actually. I work with a lot of remote team members and very often people remote miss these little side conversations.
When everyone is in a meeting room, the side conversations are fine and attendees can selective tune out if it's not relevant to them. However when team members are remote these digressions are often missed and they lose the opportunity to participate.
The Surface Pro is the tablet (and Surface Book is the laptop and Surface Laptop is the other laptop but it runs Windows S which is like Chrome OS but for Windows, and none of these should be confused with the original Surface touch table from Microsoft Research nor the Surface Studio.)
And yes, the Surface Hub is pretty good. I use it daily. It reduces the 5-10 minutes of wasted time getting Skype to work at the start of each meeting to ~1 minute. My only qualm is the sign in experience isn't as smooth as it should be, but that's the norm at Microsoft it seems.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
So it's whenever you're doing brainstorming (people can send post-it notes to it directly from their phone), organizing brainstorms into categories, keeping track of pros/cons, etc... then it turns out to be pure magic. Being able to move whole sections of a whiteboard around is incredible too.
Price info: https://wccftech.com/microsoft-surface-hub-2-22000/
There is a better article I read about the pricing when it was first announced, but that's the few top results that goes over it.
Damn I wish our company would stop buying Alexa/Home/Chromecast/Sonos/IoT-box-from-down-the-street.
I kind of wish Comic Chat still existed (though everyone should be blaming it for Comic Sans)
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
Cross-collaboration [so, xyz@company.com collaborating with abc@outlook.com] will come later.
/s
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.