Just like the office whiteboard, NetMeeting's Whiteboard is a way for conference participants to create simple illustrations during meetings. Users can display photographs, charts, graphs, tables, maps, diagrams, and other graphics, all in real time.

Whiteboard has a number of useful features. It is object-oriented, meaning that users can edit the information placed on it. (You may have experience with bitmap-oriented whiteboards, which do not allow such edits.) The whiteboard also lets you work on more than one page at a time, so conference participants can flip back and forth throughout pages and cover several ideas in one meeting. In addition, NetMeeting's Whiteboard lets you capture Desktop contents or application windows (for instance, you may want to highlight pieces of a shared document) in real time.

Get On Board.

Your first step is to establish an Internet connection. If you're at the office, it's likely that you have a constant network line; if you are at home, you probably will dial up your Internet service provider (ISP). Next, open NetMeeting by either clicking your Desktop icon or going to the Start button and choosing the NetMeeting program group. After this, you're ready to join a prearranged or spontaneous conference; call the other participants or accept a call from them.

Second, open the whiteboard by clicking the Whiteboard icon in the icon row toward the top of NetMeeting. If you are not yet in a conference, you can still open up Whiteboard. In fact, you may want to go through this tutorial before you join a conference. To open the whiteboard without being in a conference, go to the Tools menu and select Whiteboard from the drop-down menu, or press CTRL-W. You will be faced with a blank canvas, which you can maximize by clicking the open box in the upper-right corner (the same maximize button for all Windows applications).

NetMeeting Whiteboard is a way for conference participants to create simple illustrations during meetings.

Third, it's time to strut your stuff and create some content. We'll start off simply by grabbing a tool from the Whiteboard icon menu and drawing a simple illustration. There are 15 small boxes on the left side of the screen. Click the A; this will open up the text editor. Click anywhere on the whiteboard and begin typing. You'll see the string of text appearing in the whiteboard, surounded by a black rectangle that indicates where the cursor is. Click elsewhere on the page, and another black box appears. Any other typed text will be placed in that box.

Whatever you draw is now appearing on the open whiteboard of every other conference participant. The converse is also true; if someone else is drawing on the whiteboard, it will appear on your whiteboard, too.

Let's experiment a bit more with this tool. The color boxes on the bottom right (that appear when using the text tool) let you change the text color. Click any of the boxes to change the color of the text in the present box. You also can change the font, font style, and type size by clicking the Font Options button, selecting the desired setting, and choosing OK.

Now, suppose one of the conference members is in the middle of a business trip, and she's traveling from her branch office to yours. You have the bright idea of putting a map to your office on the whiteboard, and you just happen to have that graphic file in your computer. (And yes, this will work with any other graphic that was cut or copied from any Windows application.)

To place the file in the whiteboard, first you need to open the graphic. Then, copy it (do so by going to Edit and choosing Select All and then Copy, depending on your graphic's application.) Finally, click the spot on the whiteboard where you'd like to paste the graphic, and choose Paste from the Edit drop-down menu. The map is now on your screen and on those of all the other conference participants.

There's another way to place a graphic of the contents of a window (or portion of a window) onto Whiteboard. See the Select Window and Select Area icons in the next to last row of the Whiteboard icons? You can use these to paste pieces of an open application onto the whiteboard.

The Page Sorter lets you view all of the pages, delete individual pages, jump to various pages, and insert others.

Call up the window you'd like to paste from, and then have your whiteboard sitting open on top of it. Click Select Window, and the next window you click will automatically be pasted onto the whiteboard. In addition, you also can click Select Area, where you can select a rectangle-shaped piece of the open application; this will also be automatically pasted onto Whiteboard.

Let's experiment with a few more of the Whiteboard tools, and then we'll cover how to save whiteboards, open existing whiteboards, and more.

The first icon, a cursor, represents the selector tool (all of the tools are also represented under the Tools menu; the tool you are currently using will be both selected in the icon box and checked off in the Tools menu.) Click the cursor icon, click a piece of content on the whiteboard, and drag that content to move it to another section of the whiteboard.

The next row has the pen and the highlighter. Click either one; you can then draw lines or highlight pieces of text. You also have the option of changing the ink color or the line width. The next two icons let you draw straight lines and magnify pieces of the whiteboard; we recommend you take a second or two to click these and see what they do.

The next group of icons is fairly self-explanatory. The empty box, filled box, empty circle, and filled circle let you draw—you got it—empty boxes, filled boxes, empty circles, and filled circles in a variety of colors. Just click the icons and then draw the shapes wherever you desire on the whiteboard. To erase items on a whiteboard, click the icon of the cursor with the small box, put your cursor on the item to be erased, and then click the item to delete it. If you make a mistake and delete the wrong item, just go to Edit and select Undelete from the drop-down menu.

Whiteboard lets you grab pictures from other applications and paste them into a new whiteboard.

Feeling a little protective of your whiteboard? You can lock the whiteboard so no one else can work on it. Do so by either clicking the lock icon at the very bottom of the icon tray or by selecting Lock Contents from the Tools menu. The last icon lets you point to any spot on the whiteboard by clicking it; this will not alter the whiteboard contents.

Now it's time to save your masterpiece. There are no tricks here; simply go to the File menu and click Save. You'll be prompted for a location to save the file, just as you would be with other Windows application, such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, and a name for the file. Name it "Test" and click OK. You also can print out the page, using the Print command under the File menu.

Not surprisingly, saved pages also can be reopened. Suppose you want to show a graph of company stock prices during several NetMeeting conferences. To open the graph, open Whiteboard, go to Open under the File menu, browse for the proper file, and click Open.

What if you want to show several graphs of say, company stock prices, sales forecasts, and past sales results? Putting all those charts on one page may be too much information to view at once. The good news is you can create multiple pages in Whiteboard. Reopen your Test file and we'll show you how to add pages.

See the buttons on the bottom-right of the whiteboard screen? The far-right button, aptly designed as a page with a plus sign in the middle of it, lets you add a page by clicking it. The page will automatically be added after the current page. Place an item on this page, such as a filled-in box. To scroll back and forth between the two pages, just click the arrows in the lower-right corner.

You can insert pages anywhere you'd like in the whiteboard by going to the Edit menu. Click Insert Page Before to insert a page before the one currently open on your whiteboard, and click Insert Page After to insert a page after it. Try inserting a couple of pages.

Now that you have multiple pages, you may want to take advantage of the Page Sorter, which is in the Edit menu. Click it to call up a view of all the pages; you can delete individual pages, jump to various pages, and insert others.

In closing, it's time to talk about sharing. When you open Whiteboard, everyone is viewing the same screen. It's conceivable that at some point you'll want to work on a whiteboard without making the page visible to everyone else in the conference so you can present a finished product to the group later. On the Tools menu in Whiteboard, clicking Synchronize will remove the check mark, and now others will not see what you're working on. When ready, click Synchronize to display the whiteboard to the group again.

by Heidi V. Anderson