Microsoft Whiteboard in meetings and beyond

Microsoft Whiteboard is the digital whiteboard in Microsoft 365 — an infinite canvas for sketching, sticky notes, shapes, text, images, and templates with real-time co-editing across web, Windows, iOS, Android, and Surface Hub. It works as a standalone app and as the whiteboard experience inside Teams meetings.

The workshop-scale version is Whiteboard for hybrid workshops; it lives inside Teams meetings, is stored in OneDrive, and competes with Loop for lightweight collaboration.

In a Teams meeting

Open the Share menu in a Teams meeting and choose Microsoft Whiteboard. Every participant gets a live canvas they can draw on simultaneously. Useful for:

• Brainstorming with sticky notes.
• Workshop facilitation with templates (retrospectives, design exercises, decision frameworks).
• Visual collaboration during a synchronous discussion.
• Note-taking that's more flexible than a shared document.

After the meeting, the whiteboard persists. Attendees can come back to it later, continue iterating, and reference it in subsequent meetings.

Storage and governance

Whiteboards are stored in OneDrive:

• Whiteboards created in personal context live in the creator's OneDrive.
• Whiteboards created in a Teams meeting are stored in the meeting organiser's OneDrive.
• Whiteboards created in a channel meeting are stored in the channel's SharePoint site.

That means they inherit Microsoft 365 governance: retention policies, sensitivity labels, eDiscovery, Purview audit logs.

What's in the toolset

• Sticky notes in multiple colours.
• Pens with pressure sensitivity (on touch devices).
• Shapes with snap-to-grid and connectors.
• Text with formatting.
• Images dragged in.
• Reactions for live feedback.
• Templates for retros, brainstorms, planning, design thinking.
• AI features — Copilot-assisted suggestion and summarisation (with Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing).

Practical patterns

A few that work well in practice:

• Async whiteboards — start a board before a meeting, invite participants to add their notes ahead of time; review in the meeting.
• Sprint retros with a pre-loaded retro template (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for).
• Decision frameworks — pre-load a 2×2 matrix or fishbone diagram, run the discussion live.
• Visual planning for projects with sticky notes that get moved between columns.

Admin controls

Whiteboard is enabled per tenant in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Granular controls include:

• Whether Whiteboard is available at all.
• Whether anonymous meeting participants can use it.
• Whether external sharing of whiteboards is allowed.
• OneDrive storage location preferences.

For tenants new to Whiteboard, turning it on and providing a few starter templates is usually enough — adoption follows once one team uses it visibly.

Whiteboard vs Loop — picking the right lightweight tool

Both Whiteboard and Loop aim at lightweight, in-the-moment collaboration, and it's a fair question which one a given session should use. Whiteboard is the better fit for genuinely visual, spatial thinking — sticky notes arranged freely, diagrams, sketches, anything where position on a canvas carries meaning. Loop is the better fit for structured, text-first collaborative content — a shared agenda, a running list of decisions, a table of action items — that needs to be referenced and edited as a document, not just visually arranged. A retrospective with movable sticky notes belongs on a Whiteboard; a shared meeting-notes-and-action-items page that multiple people edit inline belongs in Loop. Many organisations end up using both, reaching for whichever fits the specific artefact rather than standardising on one for everything.

Frequently asked questions

Can a whiteboard created during a meeting be shared with someone who wasn't in the meeting? Yes — since it's a normal OneDrive- or SharePoint-stored file under the hood, it can be shared afterward like any other file, subject to the same sharing controls and any sensitivity label applied to it.

Does Whiteboard support real-time co-editing at large scale, like a 50-person workshop? It works, but usability degrades well before any hard technical limit — a canvas with dozens of people drawing simultaneously becomes visually chaotic and hard to facilitate; breaking a large session into smaller boards per breakout group, then consolidating afterward, is the more common pattern for genuinely large workshops.