Electronic White Boards—A Savior in the World of Meetings
By: Jeremiah Fowler

How many of your business meetings have resulted in great ideas, intricate plans and detailed schedules that have been left on the white board in the conference room? How many times have you gone back into the conference room to retreive this valuable information only to find that it has already been erased?

Corporate America faces such issues each day. It’s only when a vital project comes to a screeching halt that you realize you need a solution to the white board dilemma.

Enter a relatively new solution that’s turning standard dry erase boards on their ears. They’re called electric white boards, or interactive copyboards. In a nutshell, these advanced dry erase boards digitize everything you put on a white board and save it to your computer or allow you to print it.

But it does so much more than that. With the interactive presentation capabilities of more advanced electric white boards, you could potentially replace your office’s TV, VCR, digital projector, audio system and white board all in one.

But when you’re turning to an online company for your interactive copyboards, you have to know where to start looking. Not all electric white boards are created equal.
There are three basic types of interactive copyboards:

1. The top-of-the line interactive board integrates with a computer, a projector and even a video player so that you have a combination dry erase board and interactive computer screen. Make notes as a presentation or video is rolling, draw pictures around a video or simply write notes in the middle of a presentation. All of it can be saved for later.
2. When saving dry erase notes is most important, there is the more moderate PC-peripheral board. This electric whiteboard connects to a computer so that users can save whiteboard sessions as documents for later use.
3. A more basic interactive dry erase board is available as a stand-alone whiteboard that connects to its own printer. The cost for these can be considerably less than the top-of-the-line interactive board, but its basic functionality still serves a valuable purpose in a pinch.

When looking for an electric whiteboard for your office, think about more than the features that these high-tech dry erase boards can bring to the conference table. You should also consider the size of the components, the type of data you’ll be receiving, what types of software is available and the equipment’s mobility if you need to move from conference room to conference room.

Jeremiah Fowler manages news and information for BusinessNeedz.com, an online retailer of copiers, fax machines, laser printers, shredders, and electronic white boards.