blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

The Office 365 offering now includes a standard Video Portal. So how does it work for us? We can use it to share videos with our colleagues in an easy way. However, it has a lot of limitations at this point. The bottomline is that we can use it, but I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly yet.

Video is often talked about in the context of Corporate Communications, as it can be a great medium to convey corporate messages in a lively, appealing way. For me, video is a great medium to share knowledge, and offer ‘how to’ instructions, for example. Show, don’t tell how things work. In a video you can also capture a real-life presentation and demonstration for the people who were not able to attend it in person, like the knowledge sharing lunch sessions that I talked about in a previous post.

So the new Office 365 Video Portal could be very useful. Only it is not as useful as I had hoped. Not yet at least. I am looking forward to the improvements that will make it shine.

Video portal in the Office 365 menu

I have put the recordings of our knowledge sharing lunch sessions in the Video Portal, but a lot of basic functionality that I want to use is just not available yet. I found a lot of information about what the Video Portal does and does not do in this review and this ‘how to’. Below, I list the things I like and do not like in the Video Portal as I am setting up a video channel for our lunch session recordings. I am not trying to do anything fancy, just want share these knowledge videos in an easy way.

What I like about the Video Portal

It is easy to create a video channel

I was able to create a video channel for the lunch session within minutes, with the button New channel.

Create a new video channel

It is easy to upload a video

To add a video, just click Upload videos and then drag & drop one or more videos into the channel.

Upload videos…

… by dragging and dropping

Please be patient: It takes some time to process the video. My 47 seconds of test video of almost 20 MB took about 5 minutes.

Processing takes quite some time

It is easy to play a video

When I click on the thumbnail, the video starts to play. Then I can do the usual: play it full screen, pause it, rewind, jump to a later section, change the volume, and play it again.

Play the video, with the usual options to view full screen, pause etc.

What I miss in the current Video Portal

I cannot select my own thumbnail

The thumbnail image of the video helps users to decide if the video interests them, and it makes the video portal look more appealing.

The problem is that the system creates the thumbnail for me automatically based on the first seconds of the video. And my Lync recording all turn out with blank thumbnails. So the video thumbnails just look stupid right now… I can’t select my favourite moment and take a snapshot in the Video Portal. I can’t create my own picture manually and add that as my thumbnail. This surprised me, because I can do that in the SharePoint Media Web Part and I expected a thumbnail option here as well.

The thumbnails of my recordings are blank and I cannot change the thumbnails .

So, for now I need to edit my video before I upload it, so that the system (Azure Media Services) picks a more interesting snapshot.

I cannot add metadata except a title and description

I created a channel for Lunch sessions where I hoped all my colleagues who organize or give these sessions could upload their recordings. And I counted on metadata to structure the – hopefully – big collection of videos, by tagging the videos with the lunch session series that they belong to, the subject, the type of session, etc. That is how we organize our files and our data, right? By enriching them with metadata and offering different views and refinement options?

The problem is that currently the only metadata I can add are the title and a description; the system adds the duration (0:47 in my test video). If I want the owner of the video to be included in the metadata, I will have to ask that person to upload the video himself or herself. And even then, the owner’s name is only displayed when you click the ellips (the … dots) from the thumbnail. This surprised me, because SharePoint is  good at metadata and I expected the same functionality here.

Videos don’t have custom metadata or even categories.

The only metadata shown with the thumbnail are the title and the duration. When I click the ellips (…) I also see the description and the owner.

So for now, we use channels to provide the main structure and make the title of the video as informative as possible. In the lunch session channel, we use the following naming convention: [series] – [title of the session] – [name of the speaker] – [date of the session].

I cannot give people Contribute permissions

I want my colleagues to upload their own videos. But I am the owner of the channel, and I do not want just anybody to change the settings of my video channel.

The problem is that permissions in the video channels are all or nothing: either people can only view videos, or they can not only add and manage videos but also manage the channel itself. This also surprised me, because SharePoint has known the Contributor role since at least 2003. Obviously my SharePoint-based expectations are quite wrong for the video portal.

Permission options in the video channel

So for now I have given all my colleagues ‘channel admin’ rights in my video channel and I trust them not to break it.

The spotlights are static

I want to be able to highlight the videos that will be of special interest to many viewers, so that these interesting videos do not get swamped by the rest. This is especially important if the other ways of structuring the video collection are not optimal. In the new Video Portal I can put videos in the spotlight. Via cogwheel > Video channel settings > Spotlight.

Videos in the spotlight. A pity some thumbnails are blank..

The problem is that the spotlights are static: I have to indicate which video belongs in which spotlight tile. The spotlight tiles do not get filled automatically based on a ‘spotlight’ tag, so that we always see the latest spotlight videos. I cannot drag them from one time to another.

Spotlight settings: click on a tile to select the video that should be displayed there.

So for now, I have to manually go to the spotlight settings and change them regularly, to keep the start page fresh and to make sure the recent videos of special interest also get a chance.

Bottomline is that I find the Video Portal interesting, especially if Office 365 and the underlying Azure Media Services can handle big video files smoothly, and if we can play the movies on different devices in a size and format that fits the device. But as yet, we have only the bare bones of the Video Portal of our dreams.