Enable Microsoft Whiteboard for Teams

Whiteboard in Teams is powered by Whiteboard for the web and this is a very useful feature for collaborating in group meetings. A shared canvas space allows meeting participants to collaborate. In Office 365, Whiteboard feature is enabled by default unless you disabled it manually (mostly customers disable it due to data residency concerns).

Microsoft Note: The ability to start a new whiteboard is currently limited to the Microsoft Teams clients on Windows 10, macOS, and for the web. The Teams apps for iOS and Android cannot initiate sharing a whiteboard, but they can collaborate once a whiteboard is shared.

Now let’s get this configured. Login to Office 365 Admin center using admin credentials and type ‘Whiteboard’ in the global search field. You will get the Whiteboard global settings option in a search result dropdown.

Check the ‘Turn on’’ tick box to enable it globally in your Tenancy. Diagnostic data collection by Microsoft is disclosed via three options here.

Connected experiences and sharing from Surface Hub are two optional settings depending on the organizational requirements. Finally hit ‘Save’ to complete it.

Now the global setting is enabled, we need to ensure the Whiteboard capability is also enabled in the Meeting policies. If you have multiple policies, make sure this is enabled for all of them to affect it to the desired target audiences.

From the Teams admin center, navigate to Meetings –> Meeting policies

Then click on the desired policy (in my case, the ‘Default’ as it affects to all users)

Toggle the ‘Allow Whiteboard’ switch to ‘On’ state to enable it and hit ‘Save’

Notes: This might take a couple of ours to reflect to all users (in my case it took 7+ hours).

Testing the feature.

1. Now to try this out, you can create a test meeting with another user and ensure the Whiteboard is appearing once ‘Share’ option is clicked.

1. Also, if you login to office.com, you should be able to see the ‘Whiteboard’ App under the Apps list.

Troubleshooting:

If you still don’t see the feature in Teams meetings, try to toggle ‘Off’ the Whiteboard feature from Teams meeting policy. Then turn in it on again and try it in a couple of hours.

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