CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2011
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Software developers often use whiteboards to collaborate and document valuable drawings and ideas. These ideas usually end up getting erased or lost. TechSmith came up with a Mobile Whiteboard Capture Solution in which a person can snap a picture of a whiteboard and have that picture automatically saved and organized in the cloud to be easily located later. The goal of this project is to allow TechSmith employees, as well as the general public, to use whiteboards to collaborate and share information more easily.

This project includes a web application as well as mobile applications for the iPhone and Android devices. Users of the mobile app have the ability to take pictures which will automatically be uploaded to the cloud. Users are able to add metadata such as locations, group names, and notes to whiteboard captures. They can organize and share these captures with other users or groups of users. All whiteboard captures and user profiles can be accessed on the web application from either the mobile phone or computer where users can add metadata, annotate captures, search or browse through captures, and manage user groups and profiles.

The web application is developed in C# using the .NET 4.0 framework and Windows Azure SDK. The iPhone application is developed in Objective-C using the iOS SDK, and the Android application is developed in Java using the Android SDK. The application uses Azure Cloud Services for web hosting and data storage.