Introduction
It looks like every week Microsoft announces and deploys a new functionality in Office 365 or in Azure.
Today Microsoft announced of the Office 365 Video, which will have an important impact in the way companies will share their knowledge. According to Gartner by 2016, large companies will stream more than 16 hours of video per worker per month.
The portal home page
Let’s take a look at this Office 365 video portal.
The main portal page can be customized and can display (see next picture):
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Spotlighted videos
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Popular videos
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Videos from channels (group of videos).
Spotlight videos (1 in the above picture) can be grabbed from any channel (group of videos)
Popular videos (2 in the above picture) ratings is based on real (raw) usage for the moment but Delve will manage that in the future in order to take different kind of signals into account (like social mentions for instance).
(3 in the above picture) Videos from up to 3 channels can be display on the home page : videos fetched from channels are sorted by popularity.
Channels
Videos can be added/removed to/from channels, they can be tagged (very limited for the moment), searched, commented,featured and secured.
Navigating to channels is pretty easy, there a basically 3 main places in the portal: the search,the home page (Home) and the Channels zone (Channels) :
The Channels page looks like this :
Clicking on a Channel name (like “Executive Corner”), will display the channel content page :
We see the same layout as in the portal main page, with spotlighted videos in the header, and the channel videos sorted by popularity by default (“Popular); any user can also see the video he uploaded (“My Videos”) and the latest videos (“Newest”).
Clicking a video will open a video player windows :
In this release, Flash not be installed on your workstation, but an HTML5 player will be added later
IOS (and Android?) players will should be available too.
A “you may also like” information is also provided on every individual video page.
Finding videos
Finding video is very easy thanks to the search menu in the toolbar
The search is very limited for the moment and only based on the video Title.
For instance if U want to find all video containing the word “CEO”
This will redirect us to portal search center (here a search result page)
Search operators like OR, AND, NOT, * can be used; for instance if we want to find all videos having a title containing a word starting with “me”, but we want to exclude “meeting” : just type me* NOT meeting as illustrated below :
If we type new OR CEO :
Creating Channels
Our empty channel is created:
Manage Settings allows to manage the Channel Color (best practice: keep the related channels in the same color family), the security (who can edit the channel, who can view), and which videos should be used for the channel internal spotlight.
External users cannot access the portal in this version.
The Channels settings can also be available from the gear :
Social
A video is a documents and Office 365 allows great conversations around documents with Yammer, not just videos; so the Yammer conversion panel can be leveraged here :
Architecture
Videos are stored in documents libraries; each channel is a SharePoint site collection with one root site.
The videos are stored on the root site of each site collection in a “videos” Asset library
This asset library use a new content type : Cloud Video
This content type is defined a followed:
This Cloud video content type has an interesting “People in Video” site column (multiple people and groups).
I believe that the portal is a search based application
SharePoint provides the content storage, metadata, Security and Compliance, and search.
However, streaming, transcoding, adaptive streaming, secure delivery ( encryption) and thumbnails are handled by Azure Media Service. Videos added into SharePoint are copied to Azure where transcoding and thumbnailing will be done ; a special timer job communicate with Azure and listen to Azure activities.
Viewers view the video directly from Azure Media Service even if they click on the video in the SharePoint portal. The video is sent encrypted, but the player has the ley to decrypt it.
Right Management Services is not yet supported. I really hope it will be supported soon.
Mobiles
Videos can also be vizualized o mobiles; this is what it looks like on IPhone (the Spotlight videos, the Popular videos, and the channels are below)
More links
- Find support articles for Office 365 Video: https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/b435f99a-f47e-4ebd-a946-f5c965844f50
- Meet Office 365 Video: https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/ca1cc1a9-a615-46e1-…
- Manage your Office 365 Video portal: https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/c059465b-eba9-44e1-…
- Create and manage a channel in Office 365 Video: https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/1fede4cc-13c0-435a-…
- Video formats that work in Office 365 Video: http://support.office.com/en-us/article/dd1af01c-fd8e-4640-b…
