Whiteboards

A whiteboard is a shared drawing canvas that belongs to a team. Use it to sketch a pipeline, annotate a defect structure, or plan a simulation campaign next to the trajectories it explains. Everyone in the team who opens the same board sees the others' changes as they make them.

The editor is Excalidraw: shapes, arrows, lines, freehand drawing, text and images, with VOLT handling storage, image uploads and live sync.

The listing

Open Whiteboards in the sidebar (/dashboard/whiteboards). The table lists the boards and folders at the current location with the columns Title, Last Edited By and Updated At. Whiteboards are sorted with the most recently updated first.

• New Whiteboard creates a board named Untitled Whiteboard in the current folder and opens it.
• Click a row to open a whiteboard or enter a folder. The breadcrumb in the header takes you back up.
• A row's menu has Open Whiteboard, Rename, Move to Folder and Delete. Deleting asks for confirmation and cannot be undone. Rename opens Rename Whiteboard, which accepts titles of up to 120 characters.

Folders

Folders nest: you can create folders inside folders.

• New Folder in the header creates a folder in the current location.
• Inside a folder, the header menu has Rename Folder and Delete Folder. Folder rows have Open Folder, Rename Folder and Delete Folder in their menu.
• Move a whiteboard with Move to Folder, or drag its row onto a folder. Dragging is available when your role can update whiteboards.

The editor

A whiteboard opens at /dashboard/whiteboard/:whiteboardId, taking the whole page.

• If you change the board's name inside Excalidraw, VOLT renames the whiteboard about a second after you stop typing.
• The main menu has Back to Whiteboards, Insert image, and Excalidraw's own items to export the board as an image, clear the canvas, switch the theme and change the canvas background.
• The top-right corner shows how many people have the board open (for example 2 collaborators online), the Insert image button, and the VOLT AI assistant. The count is hidden in a local deployment.

The canvas background color and grid settings are part of the board and are shared with everyone. Your zoom, scroll position, selection and current tool are yours alone.

Images

Add images in any of three ways:

• Insert image (top-right button or main menu) opens a file picker. You can pick several files.
• Drag image files from your computer onto the canvas. They land where you drop them.
• Paste an image from the clipboard.

Any file with an image/* type is accepted. Each image is uploaded to the team's storage before it appears on the board, so collaborators load it from VOLT rather than from your browser. An image is scaled down to fit within about two thirds of the visible canvas, and several images inserted at once are stacked with a small offset.

When you paste elements copied from another whiteboard, their images are uploaded again into this board, so the copy does not depend on the original.

Drawing with VOLT AI

The VOLT AI assistant in the editor can create whiteboards and draw on them: rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, text, arrows and lines, with arrows bound to the shapes they connect. When it draws, it opens the board and adds the elements to the canvas, where they sync like any other edit. See VOLT AI.

Live collaboration

When you open a whiteboard, the editor joins the board's live session on the server and receives the current scene. From then on:

1. Your edits are batched for a fraction of a second and sent as a patch that contains only the elements that changed.
2. The server merges the patch into the board and forwards the changed elements to everyone else on the board.
3. Incoming changes are merged into your canvas without replacing what you are drawing.

Presence is a count of who has the board open. When someone joins or leaves, the editor announces it to screen readers ("… joined the whiteboard."). Collaborators' cursors and selections are not shown.

Conflicts

The server merges element by element, so two people editing different shapes never conflict. When two people change the same shape, the server keeps the copy with the higher version (Excalidraw raises an element's version on every edit). Equal versions are decided by the later edit time.

If your patch was based on an older revision than the server's, the server still merges it, then sends you the whole current scene. Your editor applies it, re-sends any of your changes that did not make it in, and shows Canvas synced — someone else was editing at the same time. (at most once every five seconds).

If the connection drops, your pending changes are kept and sent after the editor reconnects and receives the current scene.

Persistence

Each whiteboard is stored on the team's storage cluster: the scene as a JSON document, and its images next to it. Creating a whiteboard therefore needs a connected cluster that accepts storage; see Clusters.

While a board is open, the server holds its scene in memory and writes it to storage half a second after the last change, and once more when the last person leaves. There is no save button. Last Edited By in the listing is the last person who changed the board or renamed it.

Deleting a whiteboard removes its scene and all of its images. Deleting a team deletes all of its whiteboards.

Permissions

Whiteboards use the whiteboard resource of the team's roles (see Teams):

The Owner, Admin and Member system roles have all four. Viewer has whiteboard:read only.

Edits made inside an open editor travel over the live session, which checks that you are a member of the board's team. It does not check the role's whiteboard:update.

Creating and deleting whiteboards is recorded in the team's activity, shown on My Team.