author: Jonathan Stuckey
The latest facelift for Microsoft Whiteboard application and service has started rolling out to production globally. Moving to the new Fluid UI look-n-feel,
Microsoft has taken an understandable step-backwards with functionality while they port the features over and (re)start development.
Broken
While the marketing looks good, and templates appear to help, the new Whiteboard app is currently so crippled that is not possible to make use of the tool at scale.
I'll give you an example....
One customer of mine runs quarterly Agile planning sessions. This involves:
50+ different departments, 700+ people and 180+ boards running in parallel, over 2 weeks.
With the old application setup for this was laborious because templates were too rigid in editing - But you could make use of Likes for voting, Tables, Lists, Follow-up, insert documents, formatting and you could copy-n-paste between boards. Which meant you could smash out multiple-boards quickly. The interaction experience between browser and desktop app were so close that you could easily move between the two
The update to the Whiteboard web-service app means on new whiteboards the features are all gone. Yep even that good ol' staple of the content creators world is not available:
(CTL+A) select all
(CTL+C) copy all items
(CTL+V) paste items to new document
Btw this old trick worked a treat for rapid creation of multiple-boards is their specific config.
Gone temporarily - we hope.
What was worse though is mismatch between accessing a board from browser, vs. accessing a new board from the client application - which is ugly!
Example: comparison of same board accessed from new services vs. client app
Why use the Whiteboard?
Functionally the Whiteboard app has always been a laggard compared to.. well compared to anything. Heck even paper-and-pen provided more than this as a toolset, but it was a free-be with Windows 10+ and Office 365.
Whiteboard's key benefits were always really 2-fold:
integrated with Microsoft Teams meetings
integration with Surface Hub devices
But whilst we are without basic tooling in the app these benefits are barely worth noting.
What about the future?
We are told on Welcome to the new Whiteboard! - Microsoft Tech Community that the are a slew of features coming over the next 2 months. Some we've not seen before like "Collaborative cursors and rosters" (?), and the client application for Windows will be updated, plus new apps for iOS and Android are coming - but there's no sign of basic tools on the published roadmap yet - cut-n-paste, like-counts - are not on the horizon.
You wouldn't believe me to read this, but I'm actually a fan of the app. I also really appreciate Microsoft finally sorting out where the Whiteboards content is stored so we can actually manage them like we would documents, media etc.
Microsoft 365 Roadmap | ID 66767
For those that weren't aware Whiteboard will now be able to store content in your OneDrive or (eventually) SharePoint libraries - which means we will be able to use tools like search, eDiscovery, retention & disposal and load of other useful stuff.
And the roadmap for the Fluid user experience dove-tails really nicely into the Microsoft Viva vision and strategy announced in New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva.
The vision is rosy(ish) - but its just not written down or committed in the schedule
Recommendation.
If you need a Whiteboard for regular meetings, or want to do anything which may need your own repeatable template I would wait until next year.
Or take a punt at something like Miro, or Limnu. Just beware that once you've started down additional services you will have a messy job to pull everything back together when Microsoft does catch-up.
If you can muddle through with basic stickers and ad hoc drawing then the new app experience is manageable. The real test will be how quickly Microsoft can restore parity to old app and than start chipping away at its real competition. For that, I think we have some time to wait.
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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