The News: Zoom announced the Zoom One future of work vision at Zoomtopia, including plans to incorporate the Zoom Whiteboard into daily workflows. Read more on the Zoom announcements from Zoomtopia 2022.

Zoom’s Recently Announced Zoom One Shows the Power of Whiteboard

Analyst Take: Coming out of Zoom’s recent Zoomtopia event, news of Zoom One shows clearly the power of the whiteboard. And while the top line announcements for Zoom Whiteboard spoke to expanded features in the coming year, it was the ability to attach Whiteboard to a Zmail invite and return to the session in perpetuity through the calendar that I see as really setting Zoom apart.

While Zoom’s Whiteboard has been available to users since this spring, incorporating it into the daily workflow has been a challenge. With Zoom One, the addition of calendar and Zmail result in an integrated workday, providing the context and key information needed for collaborative meetings, which are attached directly to the invite. With the added benefit of being perpetual, calendar invites will provide detailed context needed to easily find and leverage documents, links, and whiteboards. Zoom’s move here is a strategic one. By changing the use of a calendar invite from a preceding indicator to perpetual context, Zoom can deliver an integrated workday within its ecosystem.

Until now Whiteboards have been simple links that can be to added relevant meetings, rather than live links that can be attached to events. This will soon change to allow for live embedding of Whiteboards to Team Chat, and Calendar invites. These changes speak to Zoom’s platform focus, encouraging teams to leverage the Zoom Whiteboard over a static whiteboard as the work continues on after the meeting, with Whiteboard acting as the record for visual communication. Additionally, the templates and shortcuts being developed for Whiteboard make it easy to incorporate visual collaboration across almost any conversation or exercise.

With teams reducing office space over the next year, the ability to share visual collaboration is becoming more central to hybrid work. With long-term hybrid work coming into focus, teams require more than just shared documents and presentations, there’s a real need for shared context, or the notes, drawings, and examples that make up shared understanding. Adding context in a natural way has been a stumbling block for many organizations, and Zoom looks poised to deliver between Zoom One and Workspaces. While Whiteboard won’t be the only technology improved by Zoom One, I see it as potentially one of the most impacted tools as the new daily workflow brings Whiteboard from a ‘nice to have’ accessory to a meeting-critical element.

Disclosure: Wainhouse Research, part of The Futurum Group family of companies, is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Wainhouse Research as a whole.