Microsoft Whiteboard

I noticed the other day that Microsoft have added another app to the suite of apps that are available to Office 365 subscribers, Microsoft Whiteboard (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app). On downloading it from the Store I was immediately impressed with the overall look and feel of the app – very professional and clearly showcases what can be done with the Windows platform.

Having said this, here are my immediate frustrations:

Where are the apps for other platforms?

Namely iOS, Android, Web, MacOS – it’s very transparent that this is a push to promote how great the inking experience is on Windows but for this to be a viable solution for businesses it needs to be available anywhere

Why upload PNGs?

Being a developer I immediately ran the app through Fiddler and what shocked me was that PNGs are being uploaded. I haven’t delved into how the synchronisation process works when multiple people are collaborating but I can’t imagine any scenario where uploading PNG is efficient. If you look at what other shared drawing experiences do (eg http://cosketch.com) there is no sharing of image, rather the line segments are sent back and forth.

Why isn’t this a Control

Again with my developer hat on, this shared whiteboard needs to be made available as an Office 365 control that developers can simply drop into their application in order to integrate a shared whiteboard experience. As more applications are built that tap into the Microsoft Graph and leverage the fact that users are connected with either an MSA or an Office 365 account, having rich component such as this would significantly cut development time and make it easier to build amazing applications.

Overall I’m impressed with Microsoft Whiteboard and hope that this is a sign of some of the great innovation that the Microsoft 365 platform will bring with it.

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