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.
It seems to be yet another area where people are organically iterating into solutions that work for them and the people they collaborate/interact with rather than everyone using the same tool that addresses all use cases.
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.
Yup, I've used to do OneNote + screensharing, but this is really directly superior, as the objects are more "interactive" in the whiteboard app, and everybody can actually draw simultaneously. (not like with screensharing, where it ends up with everybody dictating to one writing person)
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.
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.
> a little side conversation was broadcast to the other side.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
I had them for a few months -- for most of my meetings they weren't needed, but anytime you have a "creative" meeting with remote participants, they're a godsend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
