Jamboard No More

[dochxp]

Giveth with extended Chromebook life. Taketh away with the end of Jamboard 😞 

I am very sad as we use this extensively. 

Dear Edu Administrator,

We’re writing to let you know that we will wind down the Jamboard application next year. From now until October 1, 2024, the Jamboard application will continue to function normally. From October 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024, the app will be placed in “view-only” mode to give you time to backup your Jam files. While in “view-only” mode you’ll no longer be able to create new or edit existing Jams on any platform, including the web, iOS, Android, and Jamboard devices. On December 31, 2024, we will shut down the Jamboard application and your users will no longer be able to access their Jam files, and any remaining Jam files will be deleted.

[rdnixon]

Yep it sucks. Google doing what Google do best - make something good, tie people in and then kill it. We have Canva and that has a very good whiteboard app with things like share to Classroom built in so thats what I'll point people to from now on.

[AndyCaffrey]

I wrote a blog post about some of the alternatives (starting with slides, which I often had to use anyway as Jamboard wasn't great with more than about 25 editors) : https://www.canopy.education/post/alternatives-to-jamboard 

[Kim_Nilsson]

Here's a Slide deck you may use to inform users.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1K5RQnOWLEO7juf2OHYh9SwgrYYskw0dHmqWG0DLmP0E/edit?resourcekey...

[Kim_Nilsson]

Important note: I've heard from a Google PM that Jams will NOT be auto-deleted in December 2024!

They immediately reacted to the negative feedback, and will instead build a process to auto-convert all Jams to PDFs, and leave them in users' Drives. They realised that suddenly just deleting user files from Drive was a really really really bad decision.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Link to official blog post about the change.

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/09/the-next-phase-of-digital-whiteboarding-for-google-w...

[JimmyR]

For me, it's not just Jamboard but the habitual removal of services and products over the years.  I would rather that they don't even release new random services than to put out some "cool" new feature and remove it a couple of years later because the "market changed" or "we didn't get enough traction with users" or "a fly on the wall in one of our meetings told us to remove it".  It's hard to continue to be Google's cheerleader in our organization when they do stuff like this.   

[dochxp]

I agree. It does make it tricky. Also, what if you are an organisation that invested in the rather expensive Jamboard screens? How is that going to work? Eeeeek. 

[jstaime]

I am still EXTREMLY sour over their decision to cancel domains.google.com

I have had so many side gig customers on that service who are not that IT savvy and now having to migrate domains and dns records with no idea on what to do. 

The pattern of introducing a service and then killing it is becoming pretty annoying honestly. Sorry...unrelated directly, just frustrated for yet ANOTHER service that is being killed off. 

[kwright]

We got one from their grant program. Guess we’ll see what happens with that…

[MarkLoundy]

I heard about this under NDA a few days ago. Google will deprecate Jamboard by the end of next year. Both Lucid and Sigma are integrating with Google Meet and offering education orgs full free access. Both products are far superior to Jamboard. Both companies are COPPA, FERPA, etc. compliant. FigJam will be able to be deployed via the Google admin dashboard. I’m not sure about Lucid.

Miro is also involved, but we did not hear from them during our session.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Sigma?

[jstaime]

Not trying to be Mr Obvious here, but if you heard it under NDA, doesn't that mean you shouldn't be posting it here? Or was it cleared to share... Just asking

[Kim_Nilsson]

It's not under NDA anymore, as it's been posted publicly now.

[jstaime]

Got you. Wasn't aware of the lucid and sigma integration

Thanks @Kim_Nilsson 

[MarkLoundy]

The NDA expired after the 9/28 public announcement. If I agree to an NDA, I’m going to honor it.