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Comment by xzel | Hacker News Reader

I've been using one at work for a while now and I love them, which to me was a huge suprise. Its a product that finally got almost everything right when it comes to a digital whiteboard. And yes to another point that was raised here certainly integration with Mircosoft services was a plus. Its great to have a computer interface that is remote on half the board and white board interface on the other. You can mock up while you have the specs inches away from your face on a huge screen so everyone in the room can read and interact. The skype integration kills it as well; there's been a number of times I've seen teams huddled around the board mocking things up with one or two people remote.

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Can you do remote collaborative whiteboarding? I'm looking at this for either having a Hub at each end or a Hub at one end and a tablet at another. Trying to find a way to bring geographically distributed team members (virtually) closer together.

I tried my luck in this space but couldn't get it off the ground

It's fully functional but lacks polish.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.writelive

Small showcase:

- vector graphics/drawings created by freehand / writing http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934

- handles more complex drawings: (give it time to load) http://write-live.com/d/7fce10bb-bc39-43d4-a7f1-6bd0d60b9550 http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e

- unlimited* levels of zoom http://docs.write-live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=34...

- Drawings are stored in the cloud, and can be accessed by multiple devices simultaneously: co-drawing, draw on a tablet, view on tablet / web http://write-live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab

This is pretty cool

So basically it deprecates 'static' projectors, that's the shift ?

It does that, but it does a lot more too, watch the video: https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub

I did watch 2 videos of ~10min. It didn't seem as amazing as I imagined.

Most of the features are remote + ink then mail. Nothing that revolutionary. Maybe I missed other demos (I can't find a video on MS website, I used youtube, various sources)

I think my comment was too easy to interpret as lazy sarcasm, I'm just trying to get a picture of what was the setup before.

I didn't say it did anything amazing/revolutionary. At the end of the day its just a giant TV with touch features. The key bit is they got 95% of "it" right, the "it just works" factor is huge. The integration with remote desktop, the feel of writing with the stylus, quality and feel of the plastic hub, skype integration, pulling off white board sessions to email, etc.

Yeah, sorry I didn't mean you oversell anything either. The article and thread mood made me feel this way. I understand the value of an out of the box solution versus a fragile, plug and maybe play in a workplace market. I was just trying to assess the situation.

I mean, it's like GoPros, or whatever. It's not like they invented something new; they just configured existing tech in a convenient way and it turns out to be really popular.

True that's what I was trying to understand. The thing is a "Microsoft Surface Hub" feels a lot more mysterious than a gopro which is simple a sturdy waterproof cam package, you quickly get the boundaries on your own.

So you're saying this is an Apple product from the Steve Jobs era, but with a surprising nameplate? ;)

No, they've nailed it with iteration 1.

Does the fantastic integration hinge upon using Windows as your primary OS?

A lot of MS software (Outlook, SharePoint, Lync) is not that great on OSX vs. the Windows version.

Im curious how well this works in an office of people using different operating systems.

Have to agree with this.

It's getting ridiculous the OSX support for those three apps and frankly bizarre given that BYOD is very popular these days.

Before there was nothing this integrated, you really see the power towards the end of the video there. Where you see people being dialed in to help tackle whatever was on the screen there.

Imagine three teams in different locations all collaborating around the same set of drafts, stake holders being called in from all over the place for their input. It creates a real-time flow of information that was just not possible/practical before.

Do you have a direct url to the video, I dug a few webpage deep but found nothing except html galleries.

It's the "Watch Video" link in the URl shared above. 45 seconds in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRLDRQePY1o

Ok, internationalization changed something, I didn't have anything related to video even in another language. Thanks.

The thing is, as a 10 yr office worker (ouch), the specs might not amaze, but the Works!-part does. The fact that it's integrated means it probably Works, while the earlier mish-mash of MS, Cisco etc left most functions hampering.

We have a great Android based touchscreen in the Office (ok, probably a hundred). But not connected (because security, obviously), with other solutions for VC (they bring another screen, or OCS, almost Skype). Most people just use Paper and phonecam to share. Thats just awful for productivity.

It's not really the specs, more the mindset and operations delivered by the device that I was curious about. I still haven't seen the best demo people mentioned here.

> I'm just trying to get a picture of what was the setup before.

The setup before was Skyping with a spare laptop or smart TV, and often having to call each other on cell phones because the service isn't working.

There's huge value to good integration. It doesn't matter if the specs don't compete to building your own with a projector, computer, custom webcam. Because no one else has actually built it, and if you do assemble it yourself, do you want your org coming to you for troubleshooting constantly? Are you going to build it for every company you want to chat with remotely?

In the old HN thread where Dropbox was announced, you see a lot of the same sentiment. "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by..."

But the benefit isn't just having your own smart whiteboard. It's having a smart whiteboard that plays well with people who aren't able to build one themselves, and plays well with other services.

Also Slack, which (curmudgeonly) is "just" IRC with a pretty front end, as if teaching the marketing/design/billing/every non-engineer about screen and tmux was going to be a productive use of everyone's time.

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