Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – W is for…

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – W is for…

There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

W is for Whiteboard

I’ve been to lots of Teams meetings and I’ve been to lots of in-person meetings. With all the tools available in a Teams meeting, there really isn’t much difference between the two in terms of being able to work together with people and progress actions.

For example, it’s easy to screen share a document to work on it together, or set up a Loop component and collaborate in real-time on lists and updates.

While those features are great – they can also seem a bit restrictive if you want your meeting to be more about exploring ideas and mind-mapping. There’s something about looking at a blank word document that immediately saps all idea-making energy – am I right???

Enter: Microsoft Whiteboard.

If you haven’t come across it before, it’s probably because it’s hidden under the share button in your Teams meeting:

The first time you use it, as always you get a little round-up of the things you can do with it.

Then you can get on with the business of actually using it.

It comes with some preset templates depending on what your meeting is all about:

If you hover over any of the examples you can choose to get a quick preview of what it would look like during the meeting:

There are a bunch of template themes down the left hand side as well, which give you more options for the type of meeting you might be having, like a brainstorming one:

There are even templates for games if you want to start your session with a quick ice-breaker – could be useful for new teams who are getting used to working together virtually:

Once you’ve chosen the right template for your meeting, it appears for everyone in the meeting.

Software development teams will like this one, it’s a template for a retrospective (a kind of evaluation session that happens after every unit of work that gives the whole team the opportunity to call out the positives and negatives of their most recent work stint):

Once you’ve picked your template, it gets applied to the whiteboard and everyone can interact with it using the tools at the bottom of the whiteboard:

In this case, in-person retrospectives are usually performed with lots of sticky notes, and we can replicate that here. I click on sticky note colour that I want to use onto the whiteboard:

And then when I click on the white board the sticky note is stuck!

When you click on the pencil for the sticky note, you can start typing your text:

(I’ve had to zoom in on this a little bit to show the text in a readable size – that’s easy to do with the zoom controls in the bottom right of the whiteboard).

Now everyone can see the sticky note that I’ve added, as well as adding their own. You can also add reactions if you like:

If you want to take control of the whiteboard so that everyone is looking at the same parts, you can click on ‘follow me’ at the top:

Then everyone will see the whiteboard as you see it. There’s also a timer there to help keep contributions time-boxed and make sure your meeting stays on track.

You can of course start with a blank canvas if you like too – plus if you end up with a whiteboard structure that you love, you can save it as a template to use for future meetings:

Like anything, it can seem a bit clunky to use at first, but once everyone gets used to it (and gets over the novelty of using it in the first place!) it can do everything an in-person whiteboard can do.

Have you used the Teams meeting whiteboard for your meetings? Let me know what you think in the comments!

If you liked this blog and want to catch up on the rest of the A-Z series so far, you can find posts A-V here:

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/01/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-a-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/07/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/16/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-b-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/22/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-c-is-for-part-1/

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 2) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 3) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for (part 4!!!) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – D is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – E is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – F is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog