Whiteboard

A whiteboard is a free canvas for the part of a job that is not a form: sketching a sequence, working out a temporary works arrangement, marking up a photograph, drawing the thing you are about to try to describe in words. It is the tool for the conversation that happens before there is a document to have a conversation about.

Whiteboards exist at both levels. Organisation, then Whiteboard is for company work that is not tied to a job; Project, then Whiteboard is for the job. See Organisation level and project level.

Boards

The whiteboard page is a grid of boards rather than a register, each shown as a card with its name and a thumbnail of what is on it, so you find the right one by recognising it.

New Whiteboard creates one, and boards can be renamed and deleted afterwards.

Drawing

The canvas gives you freehand drawing, shapes, arrows and connectors, text, and images you can drag straight in, with pan and zoom over an unbounded surface.

There is no Save button. Work is saved automatically about two seconds after you stop changing anything, and the indicator at the top of the board tells you where that has got to. If it says Save Failed rather than Saved, your connection dropped and the change is not stored yet.

Boards are a genuine free canvas rather than a diagramming tool with rules, which is the right shape for sketching and the wrong shape for anything that has to be measured. Where you are marking up a drawing that has a scale, Markups and annotations on the real document is the tool, because those annotations stay attached to the revision they were made on.

Access is per board rather than per project, which is what makes whiteboards usable for something half formed.

Share opens a panel listing project members, and each person gets either View or Edit. Somebody with View sees the board exactly as it is and cannot change it.

There is one shortcut worth knowing: attaching a whiteboard to a mail item gives every recipient of that mail view access to it. They open the board straight from the thread and nobody has to grant access separately. See Mail.

Working together on one

Changes are saved to the board rather than streamed between people, so two people drawing on the same board at the same moment is not what this is for. The pattern that works is one person drawing while the others watch a screen share or wait, then the board being shared and read afterwards.

For a live discussion, a whiteboard is at its best in a meeting: one board, one person on the pen, and the result attached to the minutes.

SettingsHost only

Whiteboard has no Tools settings page at either level. There is nothing to configure: a board is a board, and everything that varies about it is set on the board itself through Share.

Whether the tool appears at all comes from the reader's permission template, and above that from whether the organisation's plan includes it. There is no per-project switch for a tool anywhere in Teralo. See The tools catalogue.

PermissionsHost only

Three permissions cover whiteboards, and they sit above the per-board sharing rather than replacing it.

Viewing whiteboards lets somebody see the boards they have been given access to. Creating and editing lets them make new boards and draw on ones they hold Edit on. Deleting is separate, which matters more here than it looks: a board holds thinking that was never written down anywhere else, and there is no revision history behind it to fall back on.

See How permissions work.