Microsoft is retiring the standalone Whiteboard apps and permanently deleting legacy whiteboards that are not migrated. The headline “Microsoft Whiteboard is closing” is only half right, and which half applies to you depends on whether you sign in with a work account or a personal one. Below: the real timeline, how to get your boards out in time, and where cnvs.app does and does not fit as a replacement.
Microsoft revised this schedule on 25 August 2026. These are the current published dates:
| Date | What happens | Who it hits |
|---|---|---|
| 25 September 2026 | Legacy-whiteboard migration tooling is retired. Personal accounts can no longer create or edit whiteboards. | Admins with unmigrated boards; all personal accounts |
| 16 October 2026 | Legacy whiteboards that were not migrated are permanently deleted. No recovery, no migration option afterwards. | Anyone with pre-OneDrive boards |
| 30 November 2026 | The standalone Whiteboard app for Windows, iOS and Android reaches end of support and shows a retirement screen instead of your boards. | All standalone-app users |
Microsoft has already moved these dates once — the original Message Center post gave earlier deadlines. Confirm against Microsoft's support article and Message Center post MC1441775 before you plan around them.
Do this before you evaluate any replacement, because the deletion deadline does not wait for your tooling decision.
Be clear-eyed about what an export is. PNG and SVG are pictures. Strokes, sticky notes and text come out as flat artwork, and no tool — cnvs.app included — can turn them back into editable objects. If a board contains a decision you will need to revise later, consider re-creating it in whatever tool you land on rather than archiving a picture of it.
| Capability | Microsoft Whiteboard (post-retirement) | cnvs.app |
|---|---|---|
| Account required | Yes — a Microsoft 365 work or school account | No — anyone with the URL |
| Available to personal accounts | No, after retirement | Yes |
| Standalone desktop / mobile app | Retired | Installable PWA, works offline |
| Price | Bundled with Microsoft 365 | $0, no tier above it |
| Real-time multi-user sync | Yes | Yes (WebSocket, ~100 ms) |
| Infinite canvas, pen & ink | Yes | Yes (fixed-width ink, no pressure) |
| Sticky notes / text | Yes | Yes (any text block → sticky) |
| Diagrams from text (Mermaid) | No | Built in |
| Kanban / task columns | Via templates | Built-in board mode |
| Teams meeting integration | Yes — its main advantage | No |
| OneDrive file storage, retention policies | Yes | No — 30-day inactivity expiry |
| SSO, tenant admin, eDiscovery | Yes | No |
| Templates & guided workshops | Yes | Out of scope |
| AI collaboration | Copilot, inside Microsoft's clients | Open MCP endpoint at https://cnvs.app/mcp — any agent can edit the live board |
| Privacy stance | Standard Microsoft 365 data handling | No AI training or analytics on board content; limited product analytics |
You have a Microsoft 365 work or school account and your whiteboarding happens inside Teams meetings. Nothing is being taken away from you except the standalone app — migrate your legacy boards, point people at Whiteboard on the web or the Teams app, and you are done. You also need this path if boards must live under tenant retention, eDiscovery or SSO policy.
You were on a personal Microsoft account and are losing the product outright; or you want a shared canvas that does not require the other person to have any account at all — a tutor and a student, an interviewer and a candidate, two people on a call who are not in the same tenant. Open a URL, send it, both of you are drawing. No install, no sign-in, no licence.
Drag the exported PNG or SVG straight onto a cnvs.app board, or paste it from the clipboard. It lands as an image you can move, scale and draw on top of — useful when the old board is a reference (an architecture sketch, a seating plan, a diagram you keep annotating) rather than something you need to restructure.
If you need the content live again rather than as a picture, re-create it. On a small board that is usually a few minutes of typing; cnvs.app's Mermaid support makes flowcharts and org charts faster to rebuild from text than to redraw by hand, and the MCP endpoint lets an AI assistant populate a board from a description while you watch.
You are reading this because a tool deleted, or is about to delete, your boards. So this needs saying plainly rather than buried in a FAQ: cnvs.app boards expire after 30 days of inactivity. Any board that is opened or edited within a 30-day window stays; a board nobody touches for 30 days is released and there is no user-facing recovery. Cloudflare D1 Time Travel keeps whole-database historical state for a limited disaster-recovery window (7 days Free / 30 days Paid), which is not a per-board undelete.
That design suits working sessions — the sketch during a call, the diagram for this sprint, the lesson you teach on Tuesday. It does not suit a system of record. If a board is an archive, export it (print or PDF from the browser) or keep it in something built for permanent storage. Saying this up front is the point: the failure mode you just lived through is not one we want you to repeat here. Full retention details.
Partly. For work and school accounts the service continues on the web and in Teams — only the standalone apps retire, and legacy boards must move to OneDrive-backed storage. For personal Microsoft accounts it is a genuine shutdown: creation and editing stop and no consumer replacement is offered. Most articles collapse these two cases into one headline; the difference decides whether you need to act.
Legacy (Azure-backed) whiteboards that are not migrated before the deadline are permanently deleted, with no recovery and no migration option afterwards. Migrated boards become OneDrive files and continue to work for Microsoft 365 accounts.
It depends which part you are replacing. For Teams-integrated, tenant-governed whiteboarding, the intended successor is OneDrive-backed Whiteboard in Teams — stay there. For a free, instant, no-signup shared canvas, cnvs.app: open a URL, share it, draw together, nobody creates an account. Miro and FigJam sit in between, with richer facilitation features and a signup requirement for every participant.
Not as an installed Teams app. You can paste a board link into a Teams chat or share your screen, and anyone who clicks it joins the live canvas without signing in — but there is no in-meeting Whiteboard-style integration.
No. cnvs.app has no signup at all — no Microsoft account, no email, nothing. You share a URL and whoever opens it is on the same live canvas. Boards can optionally be PIN-locked for read or write.
Yes — a Surface Pen, Apple Pencil or any stylus the browser reports as a pen draws normally, while touch is reserved for pan and pinch-zoom. Note that cnvs.app draws fixed-width ink: unlike Microsoft Whiteboard it does not vary stroke width with pen pressure or tilt, and there is no dedicated palm-rejection setting.