Effective Virtual Meeting Collaboration

For the past 18 months, the way we work and operate was transformed rapidly to digital. Video conferencing and collaboration tools were once a nice thing to have but not the main resource in a normal work environment.

Change is indeed the only constant thing in this world and that proved when the pandemic stroke.

Organizations had to adapt to the ever-challenging times. Teams realized the need to be closer virtually and learn how to collaborate and communicate in the digital space. This new landscape requires an easy-to-use tool and Zoom provides interactive, feature-filled whiteboarding and annotation.

In virtual meetings, the whiteboarding and annotation features help the team members or participants easily share ideas, highlight important points, organize thoughts, and save all things that were discussed in an instant.

This encourages every team member to participate, engage and be open to sharing their thoughts and ideas.

If you haven’t used this awesome feature or you want to be more comfortable in launching the whiteboard in your Zoom meetings, this is for you.

First and foremost, you need to enable the settings in the Zoom web portal. On the leftmost side of your Zoom web portal, you’ll find the navigation panel. Click the Account management and then the Account Settings.

Toggle the annotation and whiteboard feature to enable. Make sure to click allow saving of shared screen with annotations, allow saving of whiteboard content, and autosave whiteboard content when sharing is stopped.

Now you’re all set and ready to start a Zoom meeting or webinar. In the Zoom meeting/ webinar, look for the share screen in the menu tab located at the bottom of your meeting window. Click it and a new window will appear. It will show different screen options to be shared and choose to share Whiteboard.

Once the whiteboard is launched, the Zoom menu tab which was at the bottom will stay on top.

The menu is floating so you can still move it anywhere you want on the screen or to another screen if you have multiple monitors.

Below the menu tab, you’ll find the Annotation tools.

We prepared below a comprehensive illustration of a whiteboard.

From the left, there is the select option which is only available when you are the one screen sharing the whiteboard. This tool will select, move and resize the texts and shapes annotated.

The second is the text. Next to the text is a drawing tool wherein you can choose to insert lines, arrows, and shapes.

There is also a stamp tool with several shapes to choose from.

After the stamp is the spotlight, arrow, and vanishing pen. The purpose of these tools is to highlight the annotation.

In the middle, you can find the eraser which will work by clicking and dragging on the selected annotation.

Beside the eraser on the right is the format. It has a lot of choices such as text color, font style, size, and line width. You can be more creative using these options.

Next is the undo and redo option. This will undo the latest annotation and redo the latest annotation that you undid respectively.

Following the redo and undo is the clear option which will provide choices to clear all drawings, your drawings, or just the participant’s drawings.

Before clearing anything, it’s better to save the annotations and drawings first. You will find the save button on the second to the right just next to the X or close button.

You have the option to save the annotations as PNG or PDF.

If you need more space on your whiteboard, you can add another one by clicking the icon on the lower right corner. See illustration above.

Don’t forget to click the setting to enable annotation for others. What you’re going to do is to check in the more options on the rightmost side of the Zoom menu tab.

Lastly, participants have a different view from the whiteboard shown above. They will see a view option after the note “You are viewing (user’s name) screen. Inform the participants to click the view options and select annotate. They can now annotate on the whiteboard or on the shared screen. Anything that is shared screen, could it be a PPT slide, pdf, or word, can be annotated. This is also another way to collaborate with the team aside from the whiteboard.

We have bonus information for you.

During the Zoomtopia 2021, there was an exciting announcement on Zoom whiteboard about the upcoming features which will make it accessible across the platform from the web browser, Zoom client, in a Meeting, and in a Zoom Room. Check this link to know more: https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-whiteboard/

Happy virtual collaboration with your team and to all your meeting participants!