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Creative ways of working with whiteboards and sticky notes are growing in popularity even in global companies. However, digital tools for enabling these ways of working, especially for geographically distributed teams, have still not been adopted in these companies. We present Tele-Board, a webbased digital whiteboard and sticky note system and describe how it was used in a large company at three locations. From system log data and interviews recorded after three months of use, we found that idea generation and feedback collection can be facilitated if a system offers real-time synchronous editing as well as asynchronous input. Interestingly, the users who were not located at the company's headquarters regarded the tool as very beneficial and used it more than their colleagues at the headquarters. We provide a detailed analysis of the study and important points for fostering the adoption of creative tools in large companies.

Remote Collaboration in synchronous and in asynchronous communication settings demands for highly specialized solutions. The requirements are set even higher when teams are working creatively with methodologies such as Design Thinking where challenging and unusual problems are addressed. Based on our first Tele-Board 1 prototype which supports real-time Design Thinking for teams distributed over different locations we implemented extended functionalities for asynchronous interaction support. The "Tele-Board history browser" is a web-based user interface offering functionality to go back and forth in the timeline of a whiteboard. Additionally it is possible to view the whiteboard's usage statistics to gain insights how Design Thinkers work. In this paper we describe the system's architecture and the role of message capturing as an efficient way for saving and displaying a whiteboard history as well as for profound research data collection. With our tool we can support designers in fulfilling their common tasks more efficiently in dispersed teams and we can also assist design researchers to understand how designers work in an all-digital setting.

We present the digital whiteboard system Tele-Board, which automatically captures all interactions made on the all-digital whiteboard and thus offers possibilities for a fast interpretation of usage characteristics. Analyzing team work at whiteboards is a time-consuming and error-prone process if manual interpretation techniques are applied. In a case study, we demonstrate how to conduct and analyze whiteboard experiments with the help of our system. The study investigates the role of video compared to an audio-only connection for distributed work settings. With the simplified analysis of communication data, we can prove that the video teams were more active than the audio teams and the distribution of whiteboard interaction between team members was more balanced. In this way, automatic analyses can not only support manual observations and codings, but also give insights that cannot be achieved with other systems.

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