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Annotation Features - WhiteBoard

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NetMeeting provides a very powerful whiteboard facility, which can be used to annotate or mark documents grabbed as screenshots. Creating screen "grabs" (screenshots) of any document, web page or other content is extremely easy and straightforward with the "Select Window" tool available in NetMeeting. I wish other more sophisticated tools had such an elegant and easy-to-operate feature.

NetMeeting allows the manipulation of contents by clicking, dragging, and dropping information on the whiteboard with the mouse. It is also possible to cut, copy and paste information from any Windows-based application into the Whiteboard.

NetMeeting also allows the use of differently colored pointers to easily differentiate participants' comments.
It is possible to save the whiteboard contents for future reference. By utilizing this option the presenter can mark and annotate documents, illustrations and other materials and then open it during the session when needed. Any such content can also be dragged and dropped directly into the whiteboard area.

The whiteboard is capable of working on multiple pages and it has a simple navigation control in its bottom right corner.

The NetMeeting whiteboard offers a basic synchronization mechanism allowing all participants to see the same page of the whiteboard simultaneously. In this respect this facility can be utilized quite well for delivering PowerPoint presentations.
The presenter only needs to open the PowerPoint presentation and to cut and paste each slide into a different whiteboard page or save each slide as GIF/JPG and then drag and drop them into the whiteboard area. The advantage of this approach over running PowerPoint as a shared application, would be the one of having the whole set of annotation and mark-up facilities available.

NetMeeting 3.x includes in fact two whiteboards: The NetMeeting 3 and the NetMeeting 2.1 whiteboard, which is used in conferences where there are one or more participants using NetMeeting 2.1. There is no major difference between the two whiteboards. The reason that the two are made available is purely a technical one as the old whiteboard facility is not compatible with NetMeeting 3.

The NetMeeting whiteboard is a multi-page facility allowing the preparation and delivery of presentations through this tool. PowerPoint screenshots can be copied and pasted across multiple whiteboard pages and the facility utilized as a straightforward presentation tool.

Presentations can be easily saved and re-opened at a later time.

Here on the right are the main commands available inside NetMeeting File and Edit menus.