Since last year, there's
been a huge growth in the number of virtual team meetings. Because many of us
transitioned to remote working. Now, one of the most challenging aspects of this online environment is to have productive
brainstorming, problem solving or project planning sessions. Before, you'd just call a quick meeting, gather around a Whiteboard or a flip chart and you get creative. Maybe you collected
ideas on post-it notes. Or everyone contributed
to the flip chart content. Some of the best ideas emerge
from brainstorming sessions. Now, how do you create such an environment when your colleagues
aren't in the same room? A great way to encourage
teamwork while working online is to use Whiteboard. This is an app that's
integrated into Microsoft Teams. You can collaborate in real
time on a shared digital canvas. It's your flip chart, just online. You can write, draw and
sketch from wherever you are. And best of all, the
Whiteboard you collaborated on is available to all participants even after the team's meeting is over. Let's jump in and take a quick look. (lively music) Before I jump into a meeting and show you how to use
the Whiteboard there let me you something else
that's really useful. You can add a Whiteboard to a channel. So let's say for this Project channel I want to add a Whiteboard here. All I have to do is go to the
plus sign here to add a tab. Search for Whiteboard,
which is right here. You can post to the channel
to tell them about this tab. If you don't want that,
uncheck this and click on save. This is going to give
you a new tab on top here and everyone that has
access to the channel can use this Whiteboard. The Whiteboard experience inside Teams is the same as using
Whiteboard over the web. You'll have four different
color pens to sketch and draw. Which is much easier to do if
you're using a touch screen. Use the eraser to get rid of mistakes. This is much cleaner than
on the actual Whiteboard. You can use the text box if
you want to write something. You also have access
to these sticky notes, which you can use as post-its. You can adjust the color by
going to the color picker and selecting your color of choice. Now notice when I want
to move these around I get the hand icon. So whenever you see the hand
it means you can pan and move. If you want to move a specific object look out for the pointed arrow mouse icon. Now I can drag and move this separately and move this separately as well. Let's quickly add another
post-it to track the cons here. Now, anyone who has access to this channel can come to the Whiteboard
and update this. I can see another user is
inside this Whiteboard. If at any point in time, you
want to turn off the ability that other participants can edit, you can turn that off from here. They will get a message that they only have read
access to this Whiteboard. You can also export an
image of this Whiteboard whenever you want. Now let's take a look at
using Whiteboard in a meeting. So I've already started a
meeting with Kim from XelPlus and we've decided to collaborate
on a Whiteboard together. So I'm going to share content
(mouse clicks) and select Microsoft Whiteboard. If we already worked on this Whiteboard prior to the meeting,
we'll see everything here. And I'll show you how
to do that in a second. But in this case we've decided to work on this from scratch together. So I'm just going to add some
texts here, move things around. So we have the same options we saw before. One thing I forgot to mention is that this canvas is
infinite as Microsoft calls it. So you can move to the side,
you can move to the bottom it's never ending. With your mouse wheel, you
can zoom out and zoom back in. I'm just going to move to the side here. The good thing about using
Whiteboard inside a meeting is that you don't have
to pass around control. Kim is going to go in and
add in her project concerns. If at any point in time, you see that things
are getting out of hand because you have a lot of participants and they're adding a lot
of information to this, you can go and take
away the option for them to be able to edit. This way you can talk about and reflect on what
they've added until now. And whenever you're ready
to give them edit rights you can go back and toggle this on. Okay. So now I'm going to stop presenting. And let's go and take a look at where we can find this Whiteboard. Once the meeting is over the
participants of the meeting can get access to the
Whiteboard in different ways. One way is to go back to the meeting. So from your calendar in Teams, just double click, open up the meeting and you're going to see Whiteboard here. You can still add to this if you want and you can export the image as PNG. So this is one place. Now if there was a chat taking
place inside the meeting you can also see your chat here. And you also get to see the Whiteboard. And if there were any meeting
notes, you also see that here. So in this case, we have the Whiteboard we can access it here as well. Now, if you'd like to access
Whiteboard outside Teams you can do that by going to office.com and opening the Whiteboard app. So I'm actually going to show
it to you from Kim's view. So I'll just go to Kim's
office.com account. Let's go to more apps here. You can see Whiteboard down here. If you don't see it, select all apps. Let's go to Whiteboard and here we can see all the Whiteboard that Kim has access to. This was the one that
we used in our meeting. If for some reason Kim
doesn't want to have access to this anymore, she can choose
to leave this Whiteboard. But she can't delete it
because she's not the owner of the Whiteboard. Okay, so we took a look at where
you can find the Whiteboard after a meeting. But how can you prepare a
Whiteboard before a meeting? Okay, so now I'm back in
Teams in calendar view and I'm going to create a new meeting. Give it a title, add the attendees. Add whatever notes you
need to and click on send. Now, once the meeting is created and you go inside the meeting, So I'm just going to double click. You're going to see Whiteboard here. This is where you can prepare
the Whiteboard in advance. I'm quickly going to
lay out the Whiteboard so others know what to do. Okay. So I have prepared the
Whiteboard for the meeting. Now, whenever we start the
meeting and open the Whiteboard we're going to start with
whatever we've prepared prior to this meeting. Now, remember you can control whether others can edit or not. So if you leave this on,
another person can go in and add their notes prior to the meeting. So in this case, I want that. So I get people adding their
notes to the Whiteboard before we start. I can see one person
has just added something to the Whiteboard. What if you want to
have more functionality than is available from
Whiteboard in Teams. This is where you can
use the Whiteboard app. Now you're going to see the
option to open in app from Teams when you're in a Whiteboard. Or if you're accessing the
Whiteboard from office.com you're also going to see it here. Now, the moment you click on open in app it's going to prompt you to
either get the Windows app if you don't have it or
open the app directly. If you want to stay in
Teams select continue here. If you don't have the app
installed click on get the app. It's going to take you to
the Whiteboard app here and it's going to download it for you. Then all you have to
do is click on launch. Now you can also directly
bring up the Microsoft Store and download it from there as well. Now, once you launch it you
get to see all the Whiteboards that you'll have access
to inside the app as well. So I'm not in Microsoft Teams anymore I'm in a separate app called
the Microsoft Whiteboard. Remember this Whiteboard? This is the one that we were working on. I can continue working on
this inside the app as well. And I can see who else
is using this Whiteboard. Now, the reason I can see Kim here is because have already
shared the Whiteboard with her through my calendar invite. She already has access to this. If you want to add more
people to this Whiteboard you can add them by
going to invite someone. Now what's so special about the app? Well you get a lot more
functionality than we had before. So for example, you get to
use a ruler if you want. Then you just have to use your mouse wheel to turn the ruler in the
direction that you like. You can use the pens like we used before, you have highlighter options and so on. Now there are a lot more features here. But some of the really useful ones is for example the ability
to insert an image. Let's go ahead and quickly do that. Select library image. I'll just go with this
one and click on open and then I can place it where I want. In addition to this, you can
add Word document, PowerPoint PDF, templates, lists and a lot more. So for example, let's go ahead and add a PDF to this as well. I'll just select this, click on open and then you get to decide which page of the PDF you want to add. I'm going to insert this one. Let's adjust the size and
place it on this side here. Now, remember I'm using the app. But the great thing about the app is that we can collaborate
in real time as well. So if Kim has downloaded the app as well she has access to all of these features that I have access to. And I can see every
time she makes a change. For example, I can see that
she has given a thumbs up to this post-it note here. So this is an option that we currently don't have on the web. When I select this, I
can add a like to this. If she adds some texts, I can
see it in real time as well. So the great thing is that
we can work on this together in the app, even if
we've started a meeting. So if before the meeting you want to use these other features, you want to add in images, you can tell the people open it in the app and then let's chat
inside the Teams meeting. Because it's easier to
communicate that way. So you can talk while making the changes. Now, before we close the app there is one cool thing I want to show you and that's the templates. Do you want to run an effective meeting? Let's take a look at what the template of this one looks like. We already get placeholders. We have an agenda with a list. Now we can move this to where we want. I'm just going to drag
it to the bottom here and then let's just go up so we can see what we have available. Now, these are just placeholders. They help us get started faster. We can expand on this and adding
anything else that we want. Now the big question here is
what can we see inside Teams? Because remember originally
I created a calendar invite inside Teams and we were
using the Whiteboard there. Can Teams actually show these? So let me bring up Teams
and let's take a look. Okay. So I'm back in
Teams in calendar view. I came back to the calendar invite where we were working on that Whiteboard. Let's bring up the Whiteboard
and see what we get. So I can actually see the image here. I'm just going to zoom in
so we can see it better. I can see the image that I
inserted from the PDF document. I can actually move it around. But the one thing here that
I can't see is this object and this was the object that
I added from the template. Now notice I can also see the thumbs up inside Teams as well. I couldn't add these
directly using the Whiteboard inside Teams. I had to open it in the
app to add these in. But they are visible on
Whiteboard for the web which is the same as Whiteboard for Teams. So what it comes down to is that if you're planning
to use more functionality than what you see here, you need to tell the participants to open the Whiteboard in the app and that you can collaborate
in there directly. If you'd like to post an
existing Whiteboard to a channel one option is to go to more
options here and post to teams. You get to see your teams here. Let's just expand on this and post this one to the monthly
reporting tasks and post. Now, what do we see on the team side? When I go to monthly
reporting tasks inside Teams I can see the link to the Whiteboard here. So when I click on it it's going to open the
Whiteboard on the desktop. Now there is a lot to the Whiteboard app than we have the time
to cover in this video. So if you're interested to
find out more about that comment below and let me know and I'll create a separate video on that. One thing to remember when
you're using the Whiteboard is that all your Whiteboards are synced no matter where you use them from. So whether you use the desktop app or you use the web version
or you use a mobile version or you're using it inside Teams they're always going to be synced. The only difference is
that the Team's version which is the same as the
Whiteboard on the web can display all the
objects that you can see when you use the app. And we also don't have the
options that we have in the app. So that's how you can use
Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams which gives you a more
collaborative experience. Everyone can contribute in real time. In case you need the additional
tools, content and templates for your session, check
out the Whiteboard app. Now either way, I hope you'll
find this video helpful to encourage creative
brainstorming sessions with these tools. If you enjoyed the video,
please give it a thumbs up. And if you haven't done so already consider subscribing to my channel if you want to learn
tips and tricks for tools you use every day in the office
or in your remote office. Thank you for watching and
I'll see you in the next video. (lively music)
