Compact electronic whiteboard records your scribbles and schematics.
Nathan Garcia
YOUR TEAM CAN brainstorm without pausing to take notes if you're writing everyone's ideas on a Microfield Graphics SoftBoard instead of a whiteboard. This unique electronic whiteboard digitizes each stroke made with its markers into a series of pictures in its own software application. Meeting participants can take everything that was written on the whiteboard with them and replay it -- or use the same technology to attend the presentation from a distance, dialing in by modem. The standard-sized version won a 1994 Eddy Award; the latest SoftBoard -- Model 205 -- is a personal version, small enough to fit into the most crowded of meeting rooms, into a cubicle, or on top of a desk.
Mark My Words
The SoftBoard looks like a conventional whiteboard, and you can write on it with regular markers, without having to hold your hand in an awkward position. From a cable on its lower left edge, the SoftBoard connects to a Mac through a serial port. A receiver, which runs along the top of the SoftBoard, sends laser beams along the surface of the board. You attach one of the four color sleeves to each marker. As you draw on the SoftBoard with the marker, this sleeve reflects the receiver's laser beams. A fifth sleeve attaches to the eraser and works in the same way. The receiver interprets the reflections and reproduces everything that's happening on the whiteboard in an image that appears on the attached Mac.
The SoftBoard 205 is 39 inches high by 40.5 inches wide and has a 25.5-inch-high by 34-inch-wide writing area. Installing it was a breeze, thanks to easy-to-understand documentation on how to connect and set up the power-cable and serial-line connections. We were able to use the software -- the recording program, SBRecord; the run-time viewer, SBView; and the remote-access program, SBRemote -- without having to change any of the default settings. Among the settings you can change are the pen colors and the playback speed. You use a fourth program, SBDiag, for setup -- it let us know that the receiving sensors had shifted out of alignment slightly during shipping and gave us succinct on-screen directions on how to use the included Allen wrench to make necessary adjustments.
SBRecord, the key SoftBoard program, runs on the connected Mac. It has buttons that look like the buttons on a home cassette or CD player. As soon as you click on the Record button, SBRecord saves each mark or erasure you make on the board as a page in a series of pages. When the meeting is over, you click on the Stop button and can save the recorded actions as a file, which anyone with the freely distributable SBView program can play back like a movie or review screen by screen.
SBRemote's interface allows remote meeting participants to dial in and view the marks being made on the SoftBoard on their own computers. If the people at the other site have their own SoftBoard, they can also send a digitized image of their whiteboard to you -- the image of each SoftBoard appears in its own window on each connected Mac.
Silent Vision
None of the SoftBoard software lets you record sound with it, which can be problematic if some points need explanation. SBRemote users have to dial in on a conference call as well as on a modem line in order to participate in the meeting. And since the SoftBoard connects through a serial port, you may need to juggle printer, SoftBoard, and modem connections unless you buy a serial-port expander.
We tried hard to confuse the SoftBoard into making false marks. We found that if we held the marker at an angle close to the writing surface, the marker's color would appear as a color different from what it actually was on the Mac. And if we didn't move the pen more than a quarter inch away from the surface between separate letters or marks, it could generate false lines. But with a little care, we had no trouble creating text and drawings that transmitted accurately in SBView.
Besides the wall-mounting kit that comes with the SoftBoard 205, you can buy kits that let you set it up on the wall of a cubicle or on top of a desk. Each optional kit costs $99.
The Bottom Line
The SoftBoard brings the simplicity of a whiteboard to the computer, although without sound, viewers of SoftBoard files could end up missing essential meeting discussions. But if other methods, such as teleconferencing and shared collaboration, don't work as well as a meeting in front of a whiteboard, the SoftBoard is a great start on sharing your meetings with others who may otherwise not be able to participate. With the SoftBoard, participants can focus on listening rather than on jotting down notes. And if you have participants dialing in for a conference call, you can now also have them dial in for visual brainstorming.
Pros: Easy to set up and use. Remote meeting participants can see whiteboard on their computer. Compact.
Cons: No sound recording.
Company: Microfield Graphics, Beaverton, OR; 800-334-4922 or 503-626-9393.
Compact enough to squeeze into the smallest of offices, the SoftBoard 205 relieves meeting participants from having to take notes -- or even having to be present at all.
