About a month ago I went to a client meeting where they had a glass whiteboard in the conference room. This was the first one I had ever seen and I remarked how cool it was. The folks at Krystal GlassBoards were monitoring for keywords on twitter, and reached out to me about sending a sample for review purposes.
Now if you’ve never seen a glass whiteboard it’s a pretty substantial item, a lot more sturdy and durable than your ordinary dry erase board. Basically it’s a marker board made from tempered safety glass, that gets shipped in some heavy duty shipping protection. They have a few different options as far as sizes, and colors. If you have a white or very lightly colored wall you can go with clear glass. My wall was green, so I went with a frosted board that was 3′ x 4′.
The packaging may seem a bit intense (we’re shipping glass here people), but installing the glass whiteboard was easy. The unit comes packed with a template for drilling holes for the mounting brackets, so be sure not to rip it when you are installing it. I’d also suggest saving it in case you need to move it later. You drill four holes and put in four heavy duty wall anchors. It’s not hard at all, but you do want to pay attention while doing it so the board is straight. Once you get the wall anchors and the stainless steel stand-offs in place, you put the glass whiteboard onto the mounting brackets. You will need two people to do this since it’s a little heavy. Then you put the mounting caps on and its good to go. It’s actually a really professional looking installation. You can choose to mount your board horizontally or vertically. There’s a gallery of writeboard installations on the website. I put mine in the vertical position shown in the picture to the above right.
So why would you actually want a glass whiteboard instead of your standard dry erase board? First off, it’s a much more professional looking piece of office equipment. A dry erase board is cheaper, but it also looks cheaper too. A glass whiteboard is much more durable. After you’ve had a standard whiteboard for a while and someone forgets to erase it after a meeting you get “ghosting”– we’ve all seen it. So you get to relive the details of that meeting over and over again. With a glass whiteboard that never happens. With standard dry erase boards you need to use special markers. Eventually someone forgets and uses a sharpie permanent marker and then you’re stuck with whatever they wrote forever. With a Krystal whiteboard that’s not an issue: you can use any marker you want and clean it later with a little glass cleaner and paper towel.
If you’re interested in getting a glass whiteboard I suggest contacting the folks at Krystal and following them @krystalgwb. You won’t regret it.