Will Partners Embrace Symantec Whiteboard?

Are you a Symantec partner? Are you looking for an easy way to — no pun intended — ‘whiteboard’ your ideas? Symantec has you covered with their new Symantec Whiteboard IP. Demoed by VP of Digital Marketing Michael Parker at Symantec Partner Engage 2010, Whiteboard has some interesting potentials, but is it a big deal?

The philosophy behind Whiteboard is that people often take pictures, re-jot down notes, or generally try and grab onto sketched out ideas so they don’t lose them. But then it become troublesome to share them in an organized way.

Enter: Whiteboard, complete with a library of pre-defined images to drag, drop, draw, arrow, shift and connect together to create flowcharts easily shared and understandable by you and your coworkers. But there’s more to it than just that.

Symantec has developed their own file extension for saved documents in Whiteboard, along with touch-screen support if your boardroom HDTV or monitor supports it. And then, in a dramatic debut, Michael Parker whisked out an iPad with a sardonic remark about how everyone has been asking for support on it.

And just like the desktop, and touch-TV counterparts, the iPad version is just as simple. The real “wow” factor for me wasn’t any of this, but the fact that Parker whipped out the iPad to VGA cable, noting that Symantec would be supporting video out for presentations. That shows a lot more dedication to the software and to the use case, and might also mean that there are enough Symantec people and partners really begging for more productivity-enabled iPad uses.

And yes, the iPad version supports exportation to Symantec’s file format, along with JPEG and PNG support like the desktop versions. Partners can download the beta now at the Whiteboard site but there’s no word on the iPad version.

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