How to Use Gliffy as Your Digital Whiteboard

Gliffy helps hybrid and remote teams that work in the Atlassian ecosystem capture the creative spirit of in-person collaboration that comes from gathering around a whiteboard.

Here’s exactly how your team can use Gliffy as a digital whiteboard, too.

Gliffy’s New Digital Whiteboarding Features

Sticky Notes

With sticky notes, it’s easier than ever to brainstorm and record ideas with your team. You can color-code, move, rewrite, and easily add or delete sticky notes as you work. It’s like using real sticky notes on a whiteboard or the wall — except ours are unlimited. 😉

To learn how to use Gliffy’s sticky note feature, check out our video tutorial. You’ll learn how to create, copy, move, and change the appearance of sticky notes and see them in action.

Freehand Drawing

Sketch out concepts or make notes and changes to rough drafts of diagrams with Gliffy’s freehand drawing tool.

Lines and shapes that you’ve drawn can be moved, edited, or deleted just as easily as your typical diagram shapes, giving you all the creative freedom of a physical whiteboard with the flexibility of an online drawing tool.

To learn how to draw freehand in Gliffy and see this feature in action, watch our video tutorial here. You’ll also learn how to change the color and appearance of the lines and shapes you have drawn.

Using Gliffy as a Digital Whiteboard

Different teams have different collaborative processes and needs, and Gliffy can meet them all. Here are just a couple examples of the way Gliffy’s whiteboard functionality can help you collaborate effectively with your team. 

Collaborative Brainstorming

During a brainstorming session, you want to gather ideas quickly and make sure you don’t miss anything, even as the ideas are flowing fast. With Gliffy’s sticky notes, it’s easy to add to the conversation, giving the group a canvas for forming ideas together even when they’re not together in person.

For brainstorming techniques like starbursting, empathy mapping, SWOT analysis, and PEST analysis, as well as team-building exercises like building a team charter, Gliffy is the perfect way to record everyone’s ideas quickly and easily, and have an easily accessible record of them to refer to later.

To learn how to collaborate with your team in real time with Gliffy, visit our collaboration tutorial. (Note: Real-time collaboration is currently only available in Gliffy for Confluence Cloud.)

Agile Ceremonies

Gliffy’s whiteboarding features make it a great resource for teams to carry out their Agile ceremonies such as sprint planning and ideation sessions — especially for technical teams that work in Confluence and Jira. You can plan and complete sprints all without ever leaving your most important tools or relying on external resources or connections.

Technical Diagramming

Sometimes, when you’re in the early stages of planning a system or thinking through code, it might be easier to sketch out your ideas rather than building a diagram with all the proper symbols and notation right away.

Or, during the review process of a technical diagram illustrating a complex system or structure, you might want to quickly highlight areas to change or review. Freehand drawing makes it easy to do that and provides the person responsible for making those changes a clear record of your notes, helping the approval process run quickly and smoothly.

Plus, using Gliffy as a digital whiteboard means you can use your ideas or concept sketches in future product documentation.

Try Gliffy’s Whiteboarding Features

Ready to start collaborating? Try Gliffy’s whiteboarding features by starting your free trial of Gliffy for Confluence Cloud or Data Center.

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