New: Real-Time Collaboration with Whiteboarding Templates and Tools

Work even better as a team with real-time collaboration in SmartDraw. This game-changing feature lets multiple people open and work on the same diagram in real time. You can take your brainstorming to the next level with new whiteboarding tools and templates.

How Real-Time Collaboration Works

Open any diagram and click Share in the upper-right corner.
Send your team a link and make sure the option to "View and Edit" is selected.
Join your team in making edits and comments as a group. Active co-editors will appear next to the share button in the upper-right of your app as colored circles.
As your team moves around the document, you'll see their cursors labeled with their name so you can see what everyone's working on.

New Whiteboarding Template and Tools

Choose one of the new whiteboarding templates to get started on a team brainstorming session.

Everyone can drag and drop sticky notes and group ideas. You can use the whiteboarding tools located in the upper right corner of the app to add markup and more.

Select the pen or highlighter to draw attention to a specific shape or text to help focus a discussion.

Start a timer to track your whiteboarding session. You can stop, pause or add time as you need. It's never been easier to keep your team on the same page and working together.

New Real-Time Collaboration Options

Hide Cursors. By default, you'll see everyone's cursors when they're actively editing your document. When you have a lot of users in a single document, this may feel chaotic, so you can choose to hide cursors.
Copy Document Link. This is another way to grab the share link to invite others.
Collaborator Name and Preference. You can choose to see your team members on your screen using their display name or email address. Usually display names will be shorter and cleaner.
Set Display Name. Set your display name here. By default, SmartDraw sets this to whatever comes before the @ in your email address. Anyone with SSO will have their name populated from SSO. Same for Google Sign-in.
Bring Everyone to Me. On a large canvas, it may be easy to lose each other. If you want everyone to see the section of the document you're working on, click the "Bring Everyone to Me" option and everyone's document will refocus to what you're working on.

Tips and Tricks on Working with Real-Time Collaboration

Anyone using undo will undo the latest operation for the entire document and for every user, not just their own changes.
Loading a library only makes it available to the user who loaded it, not everyone else.
If one person switches layers, all users will switch layers.
Personal settings for the app like minimizing the toolbar, closing or opening the SmartPanel, and the recent color palettes are never shared among collaborators.
There are some document view level settings that when changed are not shared during a collaboration session. This includes showing rulers, turning the grid on and off, and changing the zoom level. However, the last person exiting the document will commit their version of these changes to the file, so the next time someone opens the document, they'll see these settings shared.