Office Video – a corporate “YouTube” solution

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Update: Office 365 Video will transition to Microsoft Stream

 

Have you ever wished that you could have a “corporate YouTube” solution in your organization’s Intranet? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have various channels with videos for training, strategy, product and service updates and other internal communication? There are a number of enterprise video platform solutions available today, including Kaltura, Qumu, Kontiki, MediaPlatform, etc. For those of you who use Office 365 for your business, you will be very happy to know that Microsoft is soon releasing a video streaming solution as part of the Office 365 offering.

What is Office Video?

Office Video is a video streaming service being released by Microsoft to Office 365 later this year. Microsoft still hasn’t announced an official date for the launch, but in the  Office 365 Roadmap announced by Microsoft last week you can see “Office Video” in the “under development” section. Using Office Video, organizations will be able to create their own “corporate YouTube” solution where they create channels, upload videos, set permissions and see what videos are most popular.

Office Video – a corporate “YouTube” solution

How does it work?

Office Video leverages Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure Media Services as a backend to transcode, stream and securely deliver the media content. Videos are displayed to the users through SharePoint Online where they can easily search and share videos.

Office Video – a corporate “YouTube” solution

Out of the box, videos can be accessed through a wide range of mobile devices, and integration with Yammer adds an additional social layer to the video solution. Users with appropriate permissions can create channels through SharePoint and upload videos related to a certain topic. To learn more you can see the Office Video presentation held by the Microsoft product team at the 2014 SharePoint Conference.

Office Video – a corporate “YouTube” solution

How can you benefit?

Your organization can benefit in a number of different ways using Office Video. Videos can be used to educate employees on various topics (take our GetSharpVideos as an example), video can also be effectively used to communicate ideas, concepts and changes within your organization. Finally, video is great for collaborating, sharing best practices across teams in a rich format.

Only available for SharePoint online users

What if you have an on-premise installation of SharePoint, will you be able to benefit from Office Video?  Currently, the answer from Microsoft is no. When it launches later this year it will only be available to Office 365 users, i.e. organizations that subscribe to SharePoint online. At this point in time, customers who want on-premise video streaming solutions need to implement a solution of their own using something like Windows Server media capabilities, or purchase a video solution that offers on-premise solutions.

Contact us to have our GetSharpVideos available as a channel

Being a provider of high-quality videos, we are of course very excited about this new service from Microsoft. It lowers the barrier for many of our customers who want to provide our videos to their employees in a convenient manner. Please feel free to contact us today at info@businessproductivity.com to learn more about how we can provide your organization with high-quality video tutorials for Office Video (or for any another video platform solution).

(If you have difficulties reading this article, you can access the full article in pdf here).