M365 Changelog: Attribution support for sticky notes in Microsoft Whiteboard

MC487011 – To provide the ability to tenant admins to enable/disable Attribution functionality for OneDrive for Business (ODB) backed whiteboards.

  • This policy controls whether users can use the attribution functionality within Whiteboard application to view who was the first and latest to write on the sticky note.
  • If you enable or don’t configure this policy setting, everyone on the whiteboard can view attributions. When enabled, board owner of the whiteboard can disable attributions for that whiteboard from Settings Panel.
  • If you disable this policy setting, users on the whiteboard cannot view attributions

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 66765

When this will happen:

This functionality will start rolling out to Whiteboard web, Teams, Windows app, Mobile, Tablets, Surface Hubs and MTRs experiences for users by end December 2022 and expect to complete by early January 2023.  

How this will affect your organization:

This service can be controlled by ‘Allow attributions in Whiteboard’ policy in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, which controls whether users have access to the functionality. 

Sticky notes before attribution:

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Sticky notes after attribution:

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What you need to do to prepare:

Note: This policy configuration will be independent of the OCE policy in OCPS (valid for other optional connected experiences) in Whiteboard.

No change is necessary, unless you wish to disable the Attribution functionality.

To do this, you can use the Office cloud policy service in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

  • Sign in to https://config.office.com/ with your Microsoft 365 admin credentials
  • Select Customization from the left pane.
  • Select Policy Management 
  • Create a new policy configuration or edit an existing one.
  • In Choose the scope, choose the security group for which you want to apply the policy.
  • In Configure Settings, choose ‘Allow attributions in Whiteboard’
  • In configuration setting, choose either – enabled, disabled, or not configured. The implication of each of these options is mentioned below:

-> Enabled: Attribution functionality is available to users

-> Disabled: Attribution functionality isn’t available to users 

-> Not configured: Attribution functionality is available to users 

  • Save the policy configuration.
  • Reassign priority for any security group if required. (If two or more policy configurations are applicable to the same set of users, the one with the higher priority is applied)
  • In case you create a new policy, configuration or change the configuration for an existing policy, there will be a delay in the change being reflected as mentioned below: 

If there were existing policy configurations prior to the change, then it will take 90 mins for the change to be reflected  

If there were no policy configurations prior to the change, then it will take 24 hours for the change to be reflected 

To learn more, visit the Microsoft Whiteboard Help Hub page

Additional information