The standard Video portal offered by Office 365 has grown a lot over the last year. It still has some limitations, but the worst problems have been solved. By now, I can recommend it for real.
A year ago, I discussed the Office 365 Video Portal in a previous blog post. At that time, I concluded that it was interesting and somewhat usable, but I could not really recommend it to innocent users yet. The Minimum Viable Product was too minimal for that. But now we are getting somewhere! See also What’s new – Office 365 video.
The Office 365 Video portal as it looks today.
Easier to add videos as a contributor
Is was never difficult to upload a video, if you had permission. But now we can do a lot more than just upload a video.
- Central upload button
you no longer have to go to a specific channel first, before you can click Upload. You can use the central Upload button and then specify where the video should go.
Click the central Upload button and then select the channel.
- Upload multiple videos and follow their progress
When you drag & drop multiple videos into the upload area, the system give you a progress indicator per video. While you wait for the video files to be uploaded, you can add descriptions and edit the titles.
Follow the progress of multiple video files that are uploaded, and tweak the titles and descriptions while you wait.
- Select a custom thumbnail
Progress in the domain of the thumbnail is huge for me. At first, the Lync/Skype for Business recordings I uploaded all had a blank screen as a thumbnail. Terrible. Then the tool automatically selected an image from further down the recording, so that I least we saw something. And now we can either choose form a set of proposed screen captures, or even upload our own image as a thumbnail.
Choose a screen capture as a thumbnail or upload your own image.
- Add closed captioning
Ok, it is not easy to create closed captioning or subtitles for a video. But if you are an advanced video maker and you have created a .vtt file for that, it is easy to upload it with the video.
Manage menu for a video, including the option to add subtitles
Easier to handle videos as a consumer
Of course it is still easy to watch a video. But now you can also tell your colleagues and discuss it directly from the video:
- E-mail a link to a colleague.
You could e-mail the link to anyone; you have to make sure yourself that the person to whom you are sending the e-mail can actually view the video.
The e-mail generated from the E-mail button.
- Comment on the video in Yammer.
The channel owner can specify the Yammer Group where the conversation will take place, if there is a one-on-one mapping between the channel and a Yammer Group. Or the channel owner can leave it up to the user to select the most appropriate Yammer Group. It is a pity you have to click to open the comments and you do not immediately see them below the video (like in YouTube), but it is nice to have the option to see and give comments anyway.
Yammer comment on a video
- Download
The channel owner can determine in the channel settings who can download the video: only owners, owners and editors, or viewers as well. Then you can download the video and watch it while you are on a train or a plane without an internet connection.
Easier to manage my video channel as an owner
I still do not have many options as an owner of a channel in the Video portal. But some crucial options have become available.
- Permissions for contributors: Editors
It came as a huge relief when I could give people permission to upload videos, without giving them permissions to change the entire channel as owners. We now have ‘Editors’.
We can now distinguish between Owners, Editors and Viewers, seperately determining which of these groups can download a video.
- Statistics
Channel owners often ask us for statistics. But video contributors also ask sometimes if they can see how often their video has been viewed. And now they can! Everybody who can view a video can also see the statistics: the total number of views near the title, and below the description a graph of the daily number of views and visitors over the last 14 days and the monthly views and visitors over the last 36 months.
The bar chart indicates how many people have watches the subsequent portions of the video. Typically, many people view the first part and then they stop watching so that less people view the later parts. Note: this chart only displays the views starting 19 February 2016, so it will not reflect reality for older videos.
The number of views of the video daily and monthly, as well as an indication of which parts of the video were viewed.
Easier to add to your team site, as a site owner
You already could add thumbnails of videos stored in the Office 365 Video portal to your SharePoint Online team site in that environment. But now it has become even easier.
- Button insert > Office 365 video
There is an explicit button to upload an Office 365 video. This amounts to the same result as clicking Embed at the video, inserting a Script editor web parts on the page and then pasting the code as a snippet. But using the Office 365 video button, you can search for a relevant video directly from the page where you are working. In this way, you display one specific video on your team site page, where the users can play it.
Insert an Office 365 video into your team site page.
- Search-driven content
You can also automatically display the latest videos from a specified channel, or display videos that meet any other search criteria, using Search-driven content web parts. The most obvious one is the one called Video.
It is not perfect yet
The Video Portal is still in development, and I hope that some things will be added and improved at a later stage.
For example, I still have to select each spotlighted video manually. It would be a lot easier if I could simply tag key videos as ‘spotlight’ and have the channel start page display the latest spotlights automatically.
In a broader sense, it is metadata that I am still missing. The only way to structure the collection of videos is by using channels. We only have the title and description to indicate what the video is about. The system also uses data that the contributor has no control over, like the publication date and the number of views, to bubble up the latest and trending videos. But not spotlighted videos, videos about a specific topic or of a specific type within a channel etc.
But even if the Video portal in Office 365 is not perfect, you can use it and get a lot of benefits from it in your digital workplace.
