Stormboard is a 2009-founded meeting and asynchronous collaboration company based out of Edmonton, Canada. The company has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft, embedding Microsoft Office online capabilities inside Stormboard in 2017. Stormboard is an industry veteran and is used by organisations worldwide, including Salesforce, General Electric, Lonely Planet, The Economist, and Liberty Mutual, to name a few.
- Virto Kanban Board for Microsoft Teams Review: A Fuss-Free Project Management Tool
- MeisterTask for Microsoft Teams Review: A Non-Nonsense Kanban Board for Teamwork
The Stormboard platform gives you a visual workspace where you can collate ideas from across stakeholders, create meeting minutes, organise your priorities, and improve brainstorming sessions. It aims to replace traditional, real-time meeting sessions with an asynchronous, whiteboard-like workspace where employees can share their ideas on a topic.
Stormboard integrates with various platforms to aid in brainstorming at various project stages and across various industry verticals. You can connect Stormboard with Azure DevOps, Slack, Box, Jira, and others, as well as most Microsoft products like Windows 10, Surface Hub, Power Automate, and Teams. Importantly, you can build your open integrations using Stormboard’s custom API or get it built by the company.
Let us review Stormboard’s Teams app in more detail.
Inside Stormboard for Microsoft Teams
To start with Stormboard, you must first download and install the Stormboard platform and log in with your Microsoft credentials. You can then integrate the app with multiple collaboration and productivity tools like Teams, Jira, Google Drive, Slack, etc. Go to Microsoft AppSource and add Stormboard as a tab on a Teams channel of your choice. This enables the following key features:
- Quick access to Storms – A visual workspace or a whiteboard in the Stormboard app is known as a Storm. You can add a specific Storm as a tab on a Teams channel. This will make the Storm’s content (notes, attachments, task lists, videos, comments, diagrams, etc.) accessible to all channel members at one click. The Stormboard integration is bidirectional, meaning Teams users can fully interact with the content on display.
- In-app Stormboard collaboration – Interaction with Storms via the Stormboard integration allows for a rich collaboration experience inside of Teams. Users can add elements, generate reports, take actions, search for specific content, and even use the built-in chat button to converse with co-workers in the Storm context directly.
- Hundreds of prebuilt templates – The Stormboard app has a large library of prebuilt templates that you can use to organise a project visually. When writing this review, Stormboard had over 200 customisable smart templates in categories like matrices, calendars, shapes, icebreakers, design, etc. All elements on a template are resizable and configurable without messing up the core template architecture.
- Instant notifications – When users interact with a Storm, you will be directly notified by the Stormboard app in Teams. The app will tell you which content was edited, the new status, and the project to which the content belongs.
- The Stormboard bot – The Stormboard bot keeps Teams users notified about all the ongoing activity in a Storm. You could either open the Storm and review all the content for yourself, or, you could interact with the Stormboard bot from the app. The bot supports simple commands to perform key functionalities like Show Profile, Enable Notifications, Log in, Logout, and Help.
Why the Stormboard App Makes a Difference
Its smart template feature is a massive USP of Stormboard, which provides incredible flexibility and customisation without causing clutter or disturbing your existing content layout. The template library is extensive, with templates for customer empathy mapping, Kanban boards, design thinking, retrospective meetings, and similar highly specific use cases. This saves you a lot of time and effort in the project planning stage, not to mention hundreds of hours saved in meeting time.
What We Think
Stormboard starts at $10 per user per month with unlimited open Storms and template access. For startups, it costs just $5 per user per month. In the segment, it is a powerful, feature-rich, and easy-to-use app for visual project management with the ability to adapt to multiple project types. Stormboard also provides free plans for educators and individuals who make do with up to 5 open Storms.
The Teams integration for Storm brings a full-featured Stormboard experience to the Microsoft environment with very little setup effort involved. And you can always extend its capabilities further by connecting with the other apps on your productivity stack.
Download it here.
