Draw & Type Together in Teams Meetings

New Toolbar Called “Collaborative Annotations”

Microsoft Teams users will soon be able to collaborate on the same screen using tools like text, drawing, reaction tags, sticky notes, and more. “Collaborative Annotation” assigns each team member a different cursor. This feature is enabled when the presenter turns it on while sharing their screen.

During screenshare, meeting attendees with Presenter roles will see the Annotation button in meeting controls at the top-center of their screen. To turn on Collaborative Annotation while screensharing, select the pen icon in meeting controls at the top-center of the screen, as shown below: 

Note: You must be a Presenter role in a meeting to turn on Collaborative Annotation.   

The red outline around the screenshare will turn blue, indicating Collaborative Annotation mode is on. All participants will see the Microsoft Whiteboard toolset at the top of the shared screen, as shown below. Everyone in the meeting can begin annotating right away in real-time. 

Collaborative Cursors show the name of every attendee as they annotate and are turned on by default. Collaborative Cursors can be turned off by anyone attending the meeting from the Settings menu in the Collaborative Annotation toolbar.  

To control who can annotate, the main Presenter can select “only I can annotate” and unselect “everyone can annotate” from the Settings menu in the Collaborative Annotation toolbar, as shown below:  

To begin annotating, users select one of the tools in the Whiteboard toolset to begin typing or drawing on screen.

To end the annotation session for everyone, select “stop annotation” in meeting controls at the top-center of the screen.  

Collaborative Annotation is only available for full-screen sharing, not individual window sharing, at this time. Web and mobile users cannot start Collaborative Annotation while sharing content. However, if a desktop user shares the screen and starts Collaborative Annotation mode, web and mobile users can participate. Exporting annotations is not supported at this time, but users can take screenshots during the meeting to save annotated content for later if necessary. Meeting rooms using Android-based devices are not supported.

Whiteboard screen share currently is not recorded in a call/screen share.

Drew Eubank • 2022-Jun-14