How Whereby is making remote collaboration easier than ever

As remote working becomes more of a normality, it’s important to be mindful about how to keep your teammates engaged during a video meeting. Some of the essential elements of real-life collaboration, such as whiteboard sessions, sketching out product roadmaps, or enjoying some informal fun, can be hard to recreate. So, over the past few months, we’ve been working on a handful of features to help make our video meetings feel more like those you might find in an office.

We recently made these features available for free to all users. You can find them via the Share button at the bottom of the screen in your next Whereby meeting. Give them a try and let us know what you think.

Host a whiteboard session

For workshop days, brainstorming, and mapping out user flows, a virtual whiteboard is an essential remote working tool. So we teamed up with Miro to add their whiteboard feature to our video meetings.

With Miro, you can easily add sticky notes, charts and tables, or ready-made templates to your whiteboard, creating the feeling of an in-person session, but without that commute to the office. This has already become a regular feature of our own meetings and we love how easy it has become to get work done as a team spread across multiple time zones.

Our users can now start a whiteboard session from any video meeting via the Share button at the bottom of the screen. What’s more, every whiteboard session gets saved for future editing and viewing once you’ve created a Miro account.

Collaborate on documents together

The Google suite of tools is a one-stop shop of productivity, featuring spreadsheets, presentations, and word files. Whereby users can view and edit any of their Google documents within a video meeting, without leaving the browser tab.

Our team already uses this feature to take meeting notes, review presentation slides before a big meeting, and discuss our performance data at the start of each week. Everyone in the meeting can edit the document in real-time - once sharing has been turned on - making remote collaboration much more efficient.

You can find our Google integration via the Share button or, if easier, just paste the link to a document into your meeting chat box and click ‘View together in room’.

Plan out the team roadmap

Trello is a favorite of Whereby’s Product and Engineering teams. We use it to plan out our product roadmaps for every quarter and assign tasks to each team member on a weekly basis.

It’s a free, flexible, and visual way to manage your company’s projects and organize pretty much anything - and you can use it in any Whereby video meeting. Like with our other collaboration features, just hit Share and you’ll be able to load up your team’s Trello project.

Watch videos as a team

Whether it’s Ted Talks, how-to tutorials, or a cheesy 80s music video you feel obliged to share, YouTube has every video a team could ever need. And we’ve made it easy to watch any public video within a Whereby meeting.

To start a video, just open the YouTube feature with the Share button or copy and paste the video link into your meeting’s chat box and a video will start playing immediately after.

These are just a few of the ways you can use Whereby to make collaboration easier for your team. Get in touch if there’s a collaboration feature you’d like us to add, or if your team is already using Whereby in other interesting ways to help improve your remote working.