Share selected Microsoft Whiteboard to Teams meeting and other updates

Microsoft Whiteboard has been updated again! For us who use that more often than other whiteboard apps these are excellent news. We are still missing promised features like locking the view, but it looks really good how Microsoft Whiteboard is improving. So let’s take a look!

The first one is that you can share any existing whiteboard to Microsoft Teams meeting. This one rocks of course, since you can prepare multiple boards in advance and share them to the audience to create a phased workshop or interactive experience. Instead of stuffing everything into a one board.

Sharing the Whiteboard is initiated just like before – you start sharing the Whiteboard to the meeting.

Unlike earlier you are seeing the Whiteboarding menu, where you can create a new board for the meeting or choose existing one.

On this one I chose the Metaverse Presentation and shared it.

If I want to change the Whiteboard, I can hit the home icon on the top left.

I then went and chose New Whiteboard. The new one gets automatically named based on the meeting name.

You can Stop Sharing and if you reshare the Whiteboard it is automatically sharing the one you had open in the meeting the last time. But you can go ahead and change the board by clicking the Whiteboard Home and choosing an another one.

Eraser : partial or entire stroke

Eraser is now defaulting removing a partial stroke, just like in the Whiteboard before this new fluid version.

You can select the erases and click on it again to open a menu where you can change it’s behavior.

Search for Bing Pictures

Microsoft has finally added the ability to search and add online pictures to the whiteboard using Bing Search. This makes it easy to add some inspiration to the board, when you add images from the net there.

Choose Images and then you can choose Bing Images.

It is very easy to start searching for pictures and inserting them to the board

And as a reminder – not all these pictures are free to use everywhere. On default you can search for Creative Commons only.

If you click in the Filter icon (just left of Creative Commons only) you can edit the results by filtering on Size, Type, Layout and Color.

Recap: What was released earlier

In case you have missed it, some other recent updates during summer have been:

When you share the Whiteboard in Teams meeting all attendees can join in and edit it, even when they are outside of your organization or anonymous users. This sharing is valid only during the meeting and when Whiteboard is being shared.

If presenter doesn’t want Whiteboard to be edited by others, he can use the gear icon to change settings for “Other participants can edit” and turn it off.

The sharing is not always perfect. For example when the anonymous user joins in after sharing has been initiated they may not see the board. Once the board is reshared in the meeting they get access to it.

Collaborative Cursors

This feature allows you to see where on the board others are editing it.

Collaborative cursors is a personal setting, so every individual can turn it on or off if they like. On default it is off very often. In this example I joined into the meeting with anonymous guest user, and that person had the Collaborative cursors off. But because my real identity had those cursors set on I was able to see what the Guest was doing.