Thought it was time to try out Microsoft’s new Whiteboard app which is available in preview on Windows 10 (SurfaceHub included). According to Microsoft this will sooner or later replace the built-in whiteboard app on SurfaceHub, which is limited to sharing and collaborating only with other hubs. It is also supported to run both apps on the hub. This means that you now can work together on a whiteboard between windows 10 devices and also on the SurfaceHub!
My intentions to start with, is to install the whiteboard app on a PC and on a SurfaceHub. From the latter I will create a session and share it with my PC, enabling a two-way collaboration.
As I’m privileged to have a Surface Hub to play around with, (only the 55″ though) I started out with installing the new whiteboard app from Windows Store. I did the same on my laptop PC with Windows 10 installed. As soon as you start the app it ask you to login. I logged in with my Office 365 credentials on both devices
I’m now logged in and ready to try out the cool features. Next to my account-name is the share button. Three different choices are made available. The first one doesn’t work, probably due to Outlook’s not installed on the Hub. (Same choice opens up Outlook on Windows 10) I click the second option and a link is created and copied to clipboard.
Now I need to send an email to my client so I can get access to the invitation-link. Instead of opening and logging into my webmail in the browser, I found it much easier to open up the good ol´ whiteboard app side by side my new one, click the send button and send an email from there. Enter the email and paste the link in the message field. You’ll get the empty whiteboard .png and.one files as an extra aswell 🙂
- An easier solution for sending out the invitation-link on the Hub would be nice. Please let me know if I am missing something here!
I now receive an email to my other device with the link included, you’ve seen it before..But when I clicked it my whiteboard app started up and gave me this error message:
I was indeed online and the link should be valid? I tried this out a few times, logging out/in, changing the user and so on but still received the same error. Not until I realized the hyperlink in outlook was wrong. This was the link sent:
https://wbd.ms/share/v2/aHR0cHM6Ly93aGl0ZWJvYXJkcy1zZXJ2aWNlLmF6dXJld2Vic2l0
ZXMubmV0L2FwaS92MS4wL3doaXRlYm9hcmRzL3JlZGVlbS8zZmE0NGU4N2YwZj
M0Y2VjYjNlNjgzNmUwYjE5ZV84NGQzZWRiMi1kZTEwLTQ5ZTAtOGMy
Ny1jNjEwNGQxNGQzNTA=
The hyperlink missed out on the equal sign in the end 🙂 Stupid but simple mistake to do!
Now, after pasting the complete link in my browser it opened up the app and successfully loaded the whiteboard session opened on my Surface Hub, without any errors!!
After quickly trying out the features and the collaboration experience of this setup I’m overall positive. The latency is ok, (also depending on network) and it’s not much different from using the native whiteboard app on the SurfaceHub except from I now can both view and get into the action on my laptop..
I will further investigate Microsoft’s new whiteboard app and also see how this play along in a Skype meeting…
/ Adam Deltinger
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