Brainstorm collaboratively: OneNote or Whiteboard

- [Instructor] Sometimes you need to brainstorm ideas collaboratively with your teammates. So let's compare two tools in Microsoft 365 that can help with this. OneNote and Whiteboard. We're starting in OneNote, which is a notebook application. That's its main function. So you can write down your thoughts or organize information however you need. I've written a few bulleted lists of topics that I need to discuss in an upcoming meeting. Now, these notebooks can be organized into different sections and each section can have multiple pages. Of course, you can write text in a note and apply special formatting but you can also add pictures or if you have a computer with a touchscreen or a stylus, you can draw on your notes or write notes freehand and you can include lots of other material in your notes as well. There is a Desktop application where you can work with OneNote but you can also use OneNote on the web. Also, if your notebooks are stored online using OneDrive or SharePoint, you can share your notebooks with your teammates, allowing multiple people to work on a notebook collaboratively. So if we go over to the File menu, then to Share, I could share this with one of my teammates but you can see, I've already shared it with Stewart. So if I go back to my notebook, we can see anywhere I see Stewart's initials. That's an area where Stewart opened the notebook and made an edit. So the main use of OneNote is for organizing your thoughts in your own notebooks. Secondary to that is the ability to use this as a shared brainstorming tool for coworkers. But there is another Microsoft 365 tool called Whiteboard. If you use Windows, there is a Desktop application that you can install or you can use Whiteboard on the web from the Microsoft 365 website. I'm already signed in here. I'll go to the app chooser up at the top and I'll open Whiteboard from here. Then you could create a new whiteboard or open one that you've been editing recently. I'll open this one up and the interface here so much more basic. At the top, I basically have drawing tools. There is an option for a text box but most of what you'll do is designed around drawing or writing out ideas freehand. It's really meant to be just like a whiteboard in a conference room. Not much more than that. So you can do this with a mouse but if you have a computer with a touchscreen or a stylus, that makes it much easier to work with. So I'm going to switch to my pen stylus and then it's much easier to draw freehand shapes. So maybe I want to sketch out an organization chart or something like that. I can do that right here. And this is also collaborative. Up at the top, there is a Share button that gives you a link to this page, so you can copy that, then paste it into an email or chat message and send it to whoever you want so multiple people can work on a whiteboard simultaneously. But I think the best use of Whiteboard, as a collaborative space, is inside of a meeting in Microsoft Teams. So I'm here in Teams. I'm going to go over to the calendar where I have a meeting already scheduled. I'm going to join that. And I believe my coworker Oliver, who is signed in with Stewart's account is already here. Hey, Oliver. - Hey, Nick. - All right, so during a meeting, if you want to do the whiteboard, you can go up to the Share button up here at the top. That'll open all of your share options and one of them is the Whiteboard. So when you select that, you'll see basically the same Whiteboard interface that we saw a moment ago but it's here inside of that meeting. Now, I'm still using my pen stylus, so I'm going to select the black pen tool here and I'm just going to start drawing something and then Oliver, I think you can draw something right here in the same whiteboard. So as we're talking, as we're brainstorming during this meeting, we can both right or sketch whatever we're talking about right here. Great, and I think that's really all we needed to see. Thanks for helping out, Oliver. - No problem. - So I'm going to click Stop Presenting, which just closes the Whiteboard, brings us back to the regular meeting. Then I'm going to click Leave to exit the meeting and I'll see ya later. - See ya Nick. - [Nick] So here's the point. If you want to work with a teammate remotely and brainstorm ideas, you can easily use either OneNote or Whiteboard as the platform but there are trade-offs and best use cases for each. If you want to learn more about OneNote, I recommend you look at the course OneNote 2016 Essential Training by David Rivers.