How to TECKboard

And why we did things the way we did them.

Can I upload data?

Of course you can. As long as you are allowed to edit or administrate a board, you can upload as much data as you want. The data will be stored securely and only as long as being on the board.

How do I upload data?

On the TECKboard interface you mainly use your right click to open functionality. In the example below, right clicking a free spot on the board will give you a menu as shown below.

Upload Files (Dateien hochladen):

This button will open up a modal like in the first image. It allows you to select up to 20 images or one pdf. Furthermore you get the option to limit the access to certain users (all of them must already be invited to your board) or specify a date of expiration. This will result in the content being removed at a given date/ time.

Embed Video (Video einfügen):

This will give you the option to insert a youtube, facebook, twitch or vimeo (actually close to any platform that offers video support) videos to be embed to the page. Note however that the video will only play in the read-mode. The orange button in the top left lets you toggle between edit and read.

Add Note (Notiz hinzufügen):

This will add a little box for you to type in text. You can specify certain users afterwards via the edit button just like for any other file.

How do I edit contents?

Again, right click any given content and press “edit”. This will open up a menu like the one shown below. On the newly shown screen you will be able to remove and add file from a content, manage User permission and customize the date of expiration.

What’s the difference between the Edit- and Read-mode?

Since we need a way to define what users are allowed to do on your board, we added a role system. There are currently 3 roles: Read, Write and Admin. All of which have different capabilities.

Read:

The read role is attached to any user who joins your board. It gives them the ability to view any public content you put up to your board. They cannot edit contents nor can they see who else is on the board or invite others.

Edit:

They can, besides that they are allowed to view everything on the board, also customize it. They are capable of adding new contents and modifying already uploaded ones. They cannot see who else is on the board or invite others.

Admin:

The admins can, as the name gives away, administrate the board. They can do anything and can see/ modify the users on the board.

If you suggest any adjustments here, don’t hesitate to let us know.

What is the orange button in the top left corner on the board for?

The button is not visible for everyone. Only those who’ve been granted the edit role or higher will be able to see the button. So if you don’t see it, don’t worry about it.

Now to the purpose:

Pressing the button will toggle between two modes we call Edit- and Read-Mode. Given that you are constantly adding new content and moving things around as an editor, you will want to eventually see how it looks when someone else is using it. Yes, they do look different in some aspects listed below:

Videos are limited to only play on the Read-Board due to performance reasons. If you wanted to see how the video looks playing, you would have to switch your view to mentioned Read-Mode. Now you can’t edit anymore, just like any user with the role read, but you’d be able to see how the video looks etc.

In the image below, you can see that no video is playing (indicated by the play button) and if you look closer you might as well spot the line indicator behind TECKboard V1. This is a edit board. So you can also right click contents to edit them. (This should be the default page loaded for anyone with the role edit or admin)

Here you can see the Read-Mode view. The video is playing (hard to show on a image) but now you won’t be able to press right click nor edit the text. You can change the mode in the top left corner at any time.

How do I invite Users?

There are two options when it comes to creating an invitation: Link and email invitation.

Link invitation

A short explanation to why there is so many options when creating a link. (All of them are optional btw.)

Let’s say you are planning an event and you want anyone on that event area to join the board via a link (hung up as a barcode for instance). Shall the link still be useable after the event is over? Probably not. So you can specify when the link will expire.

Now for the users, the use cases are a little more tricky. The scenarios in which you might want the link to be limited to a certain amount of users are very rare but we still wanted people to give the option to do so if necessary. Every time a user joined the board, the number would decrease until it reaches 0. Now nobody can join the board via that link anymore.

In any case, there should however be a link generated, which you can share with anybody you’d like. (As long as they have a TECKboard account)

E-Mail Invitations

First of all. The invitation process via e-mail is a bit tricky, I agree. We are working on improving that. The trick is that after you typed in the email addresses you either press the little Check icon to the right or press enter. This will add the emails to little boxes like so:

Only after that the send button will actually work. We should however make it auto submit the names, if something is typed in there already, I agree. (UPDATE: The page now tells you if no emails were submitted and a hint was added explaining the functionality)

Why do I need to edit invitations?

Now, why did we include the management of invitations? Let’s say you invited someone you did not mean to invite. For example included a typo in the email and now this person was invited to join your board. You’d probably want to delete the invitation so that this random person can’t see your board. The other settings are just in case you actually specified a date of expiration or a limit in usage. You can afterwards add up to that in case you’d need. This might seem useless now but there are scenarios in which it will be useful.

That is what this is for:

How do I remove or edit users on my Board?

Clicking the little icons on the user settings page will result in selecting them. This is useful if you have a large user base and want to change their roles all at once. You can also remove them together from your board. It just makes administration at scale a lot easier. You can always change a single users role on the right.

Here you can also see what I mean with different roles.

Can I share it with the others?

Yes and no. You are open to share it with anyone who is part of this beta. We’d usually like you to send us an email to add a user to the beta, but you are free to use https://teckboard.de/register on a trusted base.

How do we chat?

There is no true chat function yet, but all the chatting Timo and I have done while testing went through text contents. Look at the example below. We are currently deciding what to do next and as you are not the only one to request a true Messenger functionality, we are probably working on that next. If you want to read more on our ideas for the future and how we thought of implementing messages read “Die Zukunft” at the bottom of this blogpost: https://medium.com/@hahn_82621/teckboard-beta-12a1374d9c01?source=friends_link&sk=8ba25a258a49197de4129001012fe84f

There were actually times were entire boards were full of conversations :D

How can I start a new board?

The answer is you can’t. At least for now. This has to do with what the boards were originally meant to be. Usually they would just hang at some place and someone would edit them at home (usually a company, who paid for each board), but as we proceeded to make the interface better we realised that it could be far more than just that. Timo and I will talk to the others and see if this might evolve into something even bigger, allwoing you to create free (Software -)boards and only charging for the hardware addition.

Navigation button and teams

There are no real teams (yet). There only is a board and you can invite users to this board. You might have already spotted this little section here.

For your boards there should be no users at all and that is because no user is in your company yet. Again, this is from the old days were our thought was that a company would buy many boards and we did not see the use for private persons at that time, but that has dramatically changed. We pretty much allow companies to create certain groups of users (comparable with courses at school) and immediately add an entire group of users to their board. This would obviously require them to be part of the company or school.

The Announcement and Feedback board are for example part of the Graf-Adolf-Gymnasium company. This is easily visible in the url. The first part after the https://teckboard.de/b/ is the short name of the company. The second the one of the board.

All these functions are already there in the backend. We just did not implement them for you to use yet, because we wanted to hear your wishes on how to proceed first. So if you like, you can specify what team functionality you want.

Why is the navigation bar the way it is?

Okay. So, you probably understood now that you could potentially be on a thousand of boards at a time. In the development area for instance, my screen looks like this:

If we were to put the color settings in your personal area, how would we be able to figure out which board you wanted to edit? That’s why you can only access each board’s settings on a board (Or via the settings wheel in the top right corner as shown in the picture above). It just doesn’t work differently. I will however talk to Timo onto how we might make navigation even better. Just a short image onto why we kept it so tidy:

See how full this one looks on mobile?

Anyway, I hope this resolves many of the issues you are having. Please let us know any other issues you encounter and I am truly sorry for how long this got ;D In any case, thank you for your feedback already.