Did you know that when you share a screen in a Microsoft Teams meeting, you can annotate with another on anything that is on your screen? It could be a marketing ad, new visuals, budget – even any app running on your desktop. Annotating is basically inking on top of your screen. The cool thing? Everyone in the Teams meeting can join you at the same time (you can enable / disable their access) so you can co-create together very easily. And recently annotations have gotten new features, that are very useful.
Start annotation
Let’s start sharing the screen. The screen sharing toolbar has gone through an update recently. It can be pinned (yes!) and it is much easier to use with larger icons.
Optimize in the toolbar means optimizing the screen share for video content. This was earlier behind a shortcut key – now it can be done easily using menus.
First, start by selecting start annotation from Teams screen share toolbar.
We can see we have quite familiar tools for us to use.
Inking, comments, reactions, notes, text and shapes can be found there.
We have also settings under the gear, just as before.
There are two new features to know about.
Interact with the background
When you select interact with the background from the annotations toolbar, you can work on any app you have on your desktop. Perhaps you need to open the next page or tab. Just turn on interaction (the leftmost tool) by clicking it.
You can scroll, switch tabs, open new apps.. anything you usually do at the desktop. Inking, notes and other annotation objects are not shown when you are interacting with the background.
And once you done, just click the interact again, to stop the interaction.
Take a snapshot
Another great new feature is the ability to create a snapshot of what is being displayed on the screen, including annotations. This is not a print screen or screen capture, instead the snapshot saves your screen to the whiteboard board. Read on.
Annotations are whiteboards
When annotations were released, it was clear that it was a whiteboard. But at that time, they were not saved – you needed to use screen capture to be able to save the result. Now there is the snapshot button, that will save whatever is visible in the screen and all annotations. There is a one whiteboard board for annotations, where all objects are saved.
You can just click open annotations in whiteboard to go directly to annotation boards.
Or you can just open them from the whiteboard starter screen.
What is really cool, is that if you open the annotations whiteboard at the same time you are making annotations, you can see it updated real time
Animated picture makes this quite clear; I think. You can annotate on the screen and edit the whiteboard simultaneously. Talk about possibilities with Surface Hub..
When you take a snapshot, you can find that snapshot in the same annotation whiteboard.
When you take a snapshot
- The background (behind inking) is captured as an image
- Inking (drawings, notes, shapes, emojis, … every whiteboard object) is saved as a whiteboard on top the captured image.
- When you press snapshot again, it inserts a new snapshot to the same whiteboard.
This means, that you can share that annotations whiteboard in the meeting if you want to – and all snapshots can be found from the same board. All objects are just whiteboard objects – you can interact with them normally – just like you were using whiteboard by taking a screenshot, placing it onto the whiteboard and then inking. With annotations this a lot easier and more productive.
All snapshots are just like this one – everything done in annotation is editable with whiteboard tools. I have to admit that when I discovered this one, it was better than what I expected. Thank you, whiteboard team at Microsoft, this is excellent work!
When zooming out the whiteboard, you can see both the real time annotation and all snapshots you have taken – and it doesn’t matter if you rejoin the meeting later.
This is opening a lot (a LOT) of possibilities for how you can use annotations in meetings. For example, open the first design on the screen, start annotating with others, take a snapshot, interact with the background and bring a second design to the screen. At this point you want to delete all annotations from the screen – otherwise they would be just confusing as they were done to the previous design. Collaborate normally with annotations, take a snapshot, interact with the background to bring in the third design, clear annotations, annotate, take a snapshot, … and so on. And everything will be saved to the whiteboard for post-meeting work. And you can utilize Copilot in Whiteboard as well to categorize and summarize information from notes.. and possibly from more content in the future.
I know I will be using annotations a lot from now on. These new features make a big difference on usability.
You can share these to the Teams meeting as well, so you can continue editing the board later on – or just open it to the follow up meeting. That is done normally – just share a whiteboard and select the one you want to use: there is no difference between annotation or ordinary whiteboard.
Today (the day I was writing this blog) I did a Teams webinar to 200+ attendees. And of course, I demonstrated for them these new annotation features. What is fun, that whiteboard/annotations worked really well – no lagging, no delays, no sign of performance issues. It just works.
Oh yes, there were a lot of people annotating at the same time, as there were 200+ people in the meeting, but not everyone. I am glad not all of them were actively inking or annotating – but there were a lot of collaborative cursors until message popped out that collab cursors are turned off due to number of people.
I took a few snapshots to save those “moments”
What I didn’t have time to do, was to clear existing annotations after taking a snapshot. Since this was just a quick demo, and nothing real, it didn’t matter. 😊
And you can also find the real-time annotations in the whiteboard, even without taking a snapshot. However, I would take a snapshot just in case, and when I feel the collaboration about something is getting close to the end (=to save that moment)
Happy Annotating!
Vesa Nopanen - Future Work today 