Zoom Whiteboard Explainer
This Explainer provides an overview of Zoom Whiteboard and its capabilities.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
This Explainer provides an overview of Zoom Whiteboard and its capabilities.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
This section provides an overview and introduction to Zoom Whiteboard and its core concepts.
Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative workspace where teams can brainstorm, plan, and learn. Ideate anytime, anywhere. With cross-device compatibility, users can access their whiteboards with broad platform support across web browsers, desktop operating systems using the Zoom Workplace app (including Windows, macOS, and Linux), and mobile devices (iOS, Android). Compatibility extends to drawing and writing when using Zoom Rooms for Touch on large-format displays, as well as compatible tablets with styluses.
Whiteboards can be shared with anyone, even colleagues without Zoom accounts. When utilizing Zoom's whiteboard meeting integration or sharing a whiteboard during a Zoom meeting, all participants automatically gain access without requiring shared links or Zoom sign-ins. However, administrators have full access control over whiteboards and whether or not a user has to sign in with a Zoom account to contribute.
Zoom Whiteboard offers comprehensive real-time collaboration capabilities that enable multiple concurrent users to work together on shared whiteboards.
Diagramming containers offer a powerful way to group different content, such as shapes, sticky notes, images, and cards. Advanced whiteboarding tools enhance collaboration by enabling users to expand and clarify ideas through features such as video embedding, Kanban boards, and freehand highlighting.
Upload JPEG and PNG images for annotation and sharing. Whiteboard shapes offer extensive customization options, allowing users to adjust fill and outline properties with features like corner radius adjustment and dotted outline styles. Include advanced object types like stickers, emojis, and GIFs to add something extra to your collaborative sessions.
Company administrators will appreciate that Zoom Whiteboard plugs right into users’ favorite apps that they use every day—from Zoom Team Chat to Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Zoom Whiteboard also offers official Atlassian Jira integration, and if your organization has workflows that rely on enterprise-level document management, use the built-in Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive connections to maintain a document chain of custody.
Zoom whiteboards are a persistent, rather than one-time, whiteboard solution. And because whiteboards are stored within Zoom’s cloud architecture, users can access them in the Zoom Workplace desktop or mobile app or through the Zoom Web App at any time.
Zoom Whiteboard offers extensive template and object management capabilities. Create, share, change, or duplicate templates for rapid collaboration. Administrators can even share the collection of unique templates created by one user in a company-wide gallery through a content management dashboard.
The following details only scratch the surface of the complete diagramming tools available within Zoom Whiteboard.
Template and Publishing Management
Organization-wide publishing controls
Centralized distribution
Version control
Access permissions
Presentation templates
Diagramming templates
Kanban board templates
Pages for organizing content
Content Libraries
Custom shape libraries
Categorization and publishing controls
Container object type
Nested containers
Grouping and bulk movement
Third-party icon support
Code blocks
Syntax highlighting
Tables with formatting controls
Font customization options
Pexels image integration and import tools
Dynamic and Interactive Elements
Dynamic content support
GIPHY, emojis, custom icons
Advanced visualization
AI-generated mind maps and flowcharts
Auto-sizing, smart wrapping, transformations
Flowchart creation
Smart connectors, anchor points
Line and color style customization
Locking, layering, alignment
Quick actions for common tasks
Collaboration Tools
Advanced collaboration modes
Structured voting sessions
Private collaboration
Presentation mode
Export options
PNG, JPG, PDF
The following sections discuss how you and your teams can use the robust features of Zoom Whiteboard to simplify and speed up the often time-intensive processes of collaboration and ideation.
Unlock your teams’ potential with brainstorming, visualization, planning, and sharing tools. Zoom Whiteboard targets four core use cases:
Brainstorming: Generate ideas on a near-infinite whiteboard canvas
Visualizing: Document processes with easy-to-use diagramming tools
Planning: Map out projects on visual roadmaps and Kanban boards
Sharing: Present boards interactively and captivate your audience
Organizations can accelerate productivity by deploying standardized assets, from professional presentation layouts to comprehensive shape libraries, enabling brand consistency and workflow efficiency across the enterprise. With seamless publishing and sharing features, teams can leverage pre-approved templates while maintaining creative flexibility.
As a board owner or presenter, encourage participants to comment and ask questions in specific areas of the canvas while you reply without distracting from the ongoing discussion. Get instant feedback through sticky notes, reactions, or text boxes to add additional context to a diagram.
Quickly build diagrams of complex business processes and highly technical workflows. With the Zoom Whiteboard near-infinite canvas, you won’t run out of space. Tell a story with videos, GIFs, and an extensive built-in shape library. You can even upload your own SVG files and create a custom shape library to use across your boards.
Map out diagrams with smart connectors and object snapping. Turn visualizations into Jira tickets or tasks from within Whiteboard. Or, for additional visualization elsewhere, export a diagram to PDF or an image file for placement in documents or presentations.
Create complex project plans for your product roadmaps or Kanban-style development cycles and share them directly to an ongoing meeting. Users can integrate Zoom Whiteboard with task systems like Jira and Asana to further deepen ties to existing project management tools and take advantage of the infinite canvas for managing projects. Or, convert projects into simple presentations and broadcast them in a Zoom meeting.
Share whiteboards quickly within Zoom Workplace, or even create a new whiteboard during a meeting with built-in controls. Not in a meeting? Use Zoom Team Chat to send a link that brings users directly into Zoom Whiteboard. Zoom Docs includes interactive preview windows within each document linked to a Whiteboard, saving casual viewers the need to make an extra click to see a diagram.
If you’re using other productivity chat applications alongside Zoom Workplace, integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams enable asynchronous collaboration through Zoom Whiteboard.
With support for breakout rooms and attention management tools including voting sessions, Zoom Whiteboard is your partner for sharing content during planning sessions, workshops, and more. And unlike other whiteboard solutions that act as standalone apps, with Zoom Whiteboard you can open a board directly in a meeting, and your meeting participants automatically get collaborative access without additional actions required of them.
Zoom Whiteboard's AI Companion integration enhances digital collaboration through targeted artificial intelligence capabilities.
Zoom AI Companion streamlines common whiteboarding tasks with several key features:
Mindmapping
Flowcharts
Sticky notes, including clustering notes into logical groupings
Table creation
Zoom Whiteboard with AI Companion enhances team productivity by automating routine tasks, all while maintaining the flexibility needed for creative collaboration. Because AI Companion is integrated across Zoom Workplace, from Whiteboard to Docs, your teams can pull in content from where they prefer to work seamlessly and save time during the critical early stages of brainstorming and ideation. With AI Companion powering various Zoom Whiteboard workflows, your teams need less training and onboarding to accomplish daily tasks than other platforms.
Zoom Rooms compatibility provides seamless integration with existing Zoom Rooms systems, allowing you to access whiteboarding features directly through touchscreen interfaces.
Zoom Whiteboard’s infrastructure accommodates a wide range of digital presentation devices and display technologies. The system works seamlessly with your touchscreen devices and interactive displays, while maintaining compatibility with your Zoom Rooms appliances and controllers. Stylus support provides greater precision for drawing and writing.
Device management capabilities are centralized through the Zoom Admin Portal, providing you with powerful tools for system oversight. This includes your ability to remotely configure and update Whiteboard-enabled devices across your organization. The platform features granular control over your access and permissions, which can be managed at both the account and group levels to enable appropriate security and functionality selections for your different user segments.
Organizations using Lucidchart can import their VSDX files directly into Zoom Whiteboard. For Miro and Mural users, Zoom offers a compatible method with Miro’s APIs to transfer metadata, such as board ownership and collaborators, into an Amazon S3 bucket alongside PDF files of each board. Then, using Zoom custom APIs to create equivalent Whiteboards, you can extract data from the exported Miro PDFs and update board ownership and membership with the associated metadata.
The following export options are currently available in Zoom Whiteboard:
CSV
Export both sticky notes and tables into a CSV
Export most Whiteboard content into a static PDF
For complex migrations, PDF files are used to move some content in and out of Zoom Whiteboard
PNG
Download frame-by-frame or whole-board static image files in PNG format
PPT
Export Whiteboard files into Microsoft Powerpoint format
The following migration and import options are currently available in Zoom Whiteboard:
Miro
PDF export and import method
API method also available for Miro content to export PDFs to an Amazon S3 bucket
Convert text, notes, images, shapes, connectors, labels, and frames into whiteboard objects
Mural
PDF export and import method
API method also available for Mural content to export PDFs to an Amazon S3 bucket
Convert text, notes, images, shapes, connectors, labels, and frames into whiteboard objects
Visio
Support for files using the VSDX format
Lucidchart
Support for files using the VSDX format
There are specific limitations to your Zoom Whiteboard imports. The current import limitation is 10 boards per upload. Also, each board must be 25MB or less. Some unsupported object types may also be imported as static objects.
The Zoom Whiteboard licensing model offers flexible options across different subscription tiers. We have license types that meet the needs of users in each category, with the opportunity for power users to upgrade for more advanced use cases. You can also purchase a separate Zoom Whiteboard add-on without upgrading to an Enterprise-tier license.
Zoom offers Whiteboard licenses in three tiers. Zoom Workplace Basic and Pro accounts include Whiteboard Basic, giving them access to three concurrently editable whiteboards and 25MB of cloud storage.
For enhanced capabilities, or if you’re looking for Zoom AI Companion-enhanced functionality within Zoom Whiteboard, users have a few options. Additional tiers include Whiteboard Unlimited and Whiteboard Plus. Whiteboard Unlimited is a packaged inclusion with Zoom Workplace Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise Essentials licenses. These tiers allow for unlimited whiteboard creation and include Zoom AI Companion features like content generation, summarization, version control, and more at no additional cost.
For users requiring advanced functionality, Whiteboard Plus includes custom and organization-managed template and shape libraries, as well as third-party integrations with Jira, Asana, and Azure. These third-party integrations allow you to import task cards from your favorite project management tools and visualize them through Whiteboard’s infinite canvas and Kanban boards.
Zoom Whiteboard uses multi-layered security on Zoom-Managed Services. This protects whiteboard content across platforms. The system uses distributed data centers with region-specific storage. It includes SSO integration and domain-based access controls.
Organizations may require SSO authentication based on their security preferences. Organizations can set data residency options per their policies.
Account-specific settings implement administrative controls, enabling administrators to manage whiteboard creation, editing permissions, and sharing capabilities across their organization. This enables proper governance while maintaining flexibility for collaborative work.
Administrators get extensive control through meeting settings. They can set content retention policies and automated whiteboard lifecycle protocols. Admins can also restrict cross-organizational collaboration.
For AI Companion features, administrators can use the following designated controls to meter the level of AI usage and access:
Organization-level configuration options
Granular access controls for AI features
Domain-based restrictions
Custom usage policies per user group
Integration with existing Zoom AI Companion features
Zoom’s security architecture implements robust encryption and access controls across its platform. Zoom secures data connections over the public internet on the Zoom Workplace desktop and mobile apps using TLS 1.2 security protocols, and industry-standard encryption protects in-meeting traffic.
Within Zoom’s product environment, user meeting content is encrypted at rest, with access controls managed by account owners, administrators, and designated privileged users.
Zoom Customer Managed Key (CMK) provides enhanced security capabilities for enterprise customers requiring stricter compliance and regulatory controls. This system allows you to maintain your own encryption keys through AWS to encrypt and decrypt your data and assets. This implementation works through Zoom's Whiteboard server (DAS), which interfaces with the CMK system to handle data encryption and storage operations.
When saving data, the DAS retrieves the document owner’s encryption key from CMK, encrypts the target data, and stores it in the destination storage. During data retrieval operations, the DAS gets the decryption key from CMK to decrypt the data as it’s pulled from storage. This architecture allows you to maintain control over your encryption keys while enabling secure data handling within Zoom’s infrastructure.
Governance is another key feature of Zoom Whiteboard. Admins can enforce template-based publishing workflows and investigate comprehensive whiteboard metadata for root-cause analyses. Bulk operations also help content management activities.
Whiteboard data center regions set in the Zoom admin portal apply to Whiteboard content, as well.
Zoom Whiteboard's administrative framework provides comprehensive control and management capabilities for enterprise deployment. The system encompasses sophisticated meeting settings management coupled with configurable retention policies for automated whiteboard lifecycle management. Administrative controls extend to data residency options, which align with organizational Account Profile policies for content storage location management.
The platform offers extensive API integration capabilities, enabling custom solution development and integration with existing enterprise systems. Security features include customizable collaboration disclaimers and granular controls for cross-organizational collaboration restrictions.
Enterprise management tools for IT admins allow them to manage and control access to Zoom Whiteboard, including default sharing permissions like the ability to share a whiteboard with anyone who has an active Zoom account.
Whiteboard owners and admins can control who has access to and can see their whiteboards. By default, the creator, listed as the owner, is the only person who can access new whiteboards created outside meetings; these whiteboards are private. Owners can then invite additional editors, commenters, or viewers, and create links to share with their organization.
Zoom administrators can selectively enable whiteboard access at the group and account levels, restricting feature access to approved users or groups.
Whiteboard admins can also:
Enable or disable Zoom Whiteboard for in-meeting or out-of-meeting usage
Enable or disable cloud storage for whiteboards
Enable or disable the ability to export whiteboards to PNG or PDF
Enable or disable the ability to share boards outside their organization
Collaborative whiteboarding is possible and enjoyable for both in-room participants and remote attendees, creating a unified experience regardless of location. See the support article for more information on enabling Whiteboard use for Zoom Rooms. If you’re interested in Zoom Rooms for Touch, please see the support article for instructions specific to those setups.
See our to learn more about licenses and pricing.
Whiteboard Plus is included with the Enterprise Plus license, or as an additional add-on purchase for other license tiers. Whiteboard Plus offers advanced diagramming functionality and collaboration features like advanced shape types and . Enterprise licenses allow for flexible collaboration without automatic license assignment, as well as domain-based sharing controls for administrators. Zoom allows all users to edit whiteboards regardless of license status, providing greater collaboration flexibility.
Multiple license types can be applied to a user. Add-ons beyond Zoom Whiteboard include Zoom Phone, Zoom Revenue Accelerator, and more. See the support article for more information on adding licenses to user accounts.
