Making Collaboration Easier with Microsoft Teams Whiteboard

November 29, 2021

By Rhia Prajes

As remote work becomes more common, it is highly important to maintain communication and collaboration within organizations. To help facilitate this, Microsoft introduced Whiteboard in Teams to bring staff together in a rich visual collaboration workspace. This tool continuously updates to enable enhanced collaboration whenever you need it, wherever you are. As a free tool built into the apps that many teams are already using, there is great untapped potential to improve how they collaborate everyday.

Here of some of the best new features, available on the web, desktop, iOS, and Android apps:

Revised UI

Whiteboard has been given a visual refresh with features easier to access and find, thus, bringing ease for more centralized visual collaboration. It also provides Ink Tools and Content Creation menus with an available app bar at the top of the canvass which provides all your collaboration and board-specific properties.

New Organization Features

Whiteboard now includes over forty templates to help teams get started faster for common scenarios like problem solving, group projects, design and research, project planning, learning, strategy, to name a few. New drag-and-drop widgets have also been introduced, like dedicated areas for sticky notes and tasks, which helps to provide structure without too much prep. Altogether, it’s much more colorful and organized, which can be very handy for your team’s brainstorming activities. By creating a color code system, for example, and sorting categories through colors or assigning a color for each content contributor, you can better encourage participation through the beauty of color.

Expression through reactions and images

Giving real-time feedback on current projects and collaboration is as relevant as the work itself. In Whiteboard, you can easily provide contextual feedback through a reaction from sets of fun emojis and icons. By simply adding a thumbs up or thumbs down, for example, you can easily provide thoughts on an idea without disrupting a presenter or leave feedback for another user to review later. With the addition of drag and drop image upload capabilities, you can also more easily convey visual information that would have otherwise been difficult with just text, shapes, and digital ink.

New Inking Tools

Speaking of digital ink, Whiteboard also features numerous tools to simplify the working with a touchscreen. With Intelligent shape detection for shapes, arrows and lines, Pens and Highlighter Options, and improved Object Alignment, Whiteboard offers multiple options and mode to bring your team’s ideas into a rich visual content. The different options and mode capabilities plus a format background will surely win your team’s content objectives.

In Conclusion

With all the new enhancements and functionalities, Microsoft Whiteboard brings out the best of your team’s visual collaboration and communication. And since Microsoft is continuously refreshing and updating the Whiteboard to meet the specific needs of its users, more opportunities for improving team collaboration are likely to be released as well.

If your organization needs help for Microsoft Teams Adoption, Metro CSG is a Microsoft Gold Partner for Cloud Productivity with expertise in Microsoft 365. Contact us if you need any of our expert advice!

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