Microsoft Whiteboard comes to Teams meetings in preview

Microsoft Teams and Whiteboard are cozying up as part of a slew of features announced by Microsoft today. When you're in a Teams meeting, anyone will now be able to instantly open Whiteboard within the meeting to begin collaboratively inking with other participants in real time.

From Microsoft:

Users can ink together in real-time on the board and even launch the native Whiteboard app to enable an even richer collaboration experience with features such as sticky notes, images, and gridlines. Ink Grab, enables you add analog content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch.

Whiteboard in Team meetings is currently available in preview on desktop and the web, but mobile support is coming soon. You can learn more about turning Whiteboard on in Microsoft Teams at Microsoft's support site.

In addition to Whiteboard's arrival, Teams is in line for a bunch of other new features. Live captions for meetings are in the works, and should be available in preview for English soon, Microsoft says. Users will also be able to take advantage of secure private channels and information barriers to help prevent conflicts of interest and keep information secure. Both features are expected later this year.

The "Meetings" app in Teams is also set to be replaced by a new "Calendar" app in April. The refreshed app will let you go forward and backward in time to view any past or future meetings. You'll also be able to view your calendar by Day, Work week, and Week views, as well as join, RSVP, edit, and cancel meetings with a click.

For more on what's coming to Teams, you can check out Microsoft's full blog post for more.