Collaboration is key in any organization, and continues to be the primary strategy for Microsoft’s Office 365 line of products. This week, Microsoft quietly released a preview of Microsoft Whiteboard into the market. While currently light on features, the most important aspects of this new tool are its integrations with Office 365 and Surface Hub. Organizations can activate the Whiteboard Preview in their Office 365 tenant and enable users to begin collaborating remotely with multi-user simultaneous editing, the ability to store whiteboards in the cloud, and even easy invitations of 3rd parties via e-mail or a sharing link.

As mentioned, the feature list is fairly light at this time, but the product is still in preview. A few pen colors are available, as well as the ability to import images and create sticky notes. The experience is fairly lackluster with traditional mouse and keyboard, but begins to come to life when using a pen on a touch enabled device, such as the Microsoft Surface. If the feature set is expounded upon, this could be a great addition to the already vast set of tools included in the Office 365 family of applications, and further enable mobile work forces to collaborate seamlessly. Hopefully, practice will improve my own drawing ability, as you can see is pretty lackluster in my 60 second attempt at an example drawing.

You can download the Whiteboard Preview today, from the Microsoft Store.