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Incorporating Video into SharePoint

2/15/16 9:02 AM

Remember the dial up internet experience? That all-too-familiar sound of your modem searching for a connection, locking in on the signal, and your applications (such as they were) suddenly springing to life? I'm often reminded of those years gone by whenever I am accessing a conference or hotel wi-fi connection and need to work with video content and my connection slows to a crawl. While the occasional screen flutter of a streaming video service is lightning fast compared to most old dial up connections, our frustration with this kind of spotty service quality is a reminder of how important video (and high-speed internet) has become to information workers.

Understanding the link between video and social with Beezy

Video has transformed the way we work, how we educate our teams and our customers, and how we are entertained. However, one major problem within the enterprise is that our video content often sits outside of our knowledge management classification and management strategies. Most organizations overly rely on their site structure for applying the appropriate metadata, and very few organizations take the time or expense to transcribe for full search fidelity. Tools are available that allow end users to parse their video content, or to simply tag and reference video at specific moments, providing a much more powerful and relevant connection to the rest of your corporate information assets.

Increasingly, administrators are being asked to add video content to their SharePoint sites, and to the company portal to quickly disseminate important information and to maintain company culture. Employees are already actively sharing them within social communities, posting video content to internal and external blogs and wikis, and leveraging them within the latest tool within the Microsoft Office family, Sway.

And rather than find important information locked away inside of documentation, employees prefer to consume educational material and training via video content.

According to a 2014 study conducted by Kaltura, a leading video streaming platform provider, the typical employee generates 2.9 hours of video per month, with enterprise organizations or geographically dispersed teams creating even more.

That's a tremendous amount of content being generated -- and typically not being properly classified. Also according to Kaltura, 75% of survey respondents stated the strongest driver of corporate value is when video is aligned with social, with 66% stating that embedding video within the platform (such as SharePoint) will likely increase user adoption.

Metadata is fundamental to making social, knowledge management, and video contextual and relevant. Given the rising importance of video within the enterprise, it's no surprise that Microsoft is focusing on this within the Office 365 platform. Office 365 Video is one of the latest NextGen Portal experiences, with a steady stream of innovations coming from the product team to help organizations make the most of their video assets (here's a video to show you how it works!). Within Office 365, the Video Portal Hub is a search-based site collection that acts as your primary video aggregation site. Videos are actually stored in separate Video Channels where they are classified and stored, to be surfaced in the Hub where you can build your viewing lists.

Every SharePoint customer should have a video strategy, because it is a great way to quickly add value to your environment. The problem of finding ROI is more than just moving video content from a file share -- you must have a strategy for classifying and cataloging this content so that your employees can search for, and find, the most relevant content.

Most IT projects often move forward without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered, without a clear picture of that "end state" of the project. Many organizations see the inherent value of expanding their use of video, but have trouble articulating this value to management and executive sponsors, which is a serious problem -- and this can impact the long-term success of any project. As with any new technology, have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish, and pilot first. At Beezy, we're big believers in the piloting model, allowing organizations to test not just the technology -- but their metrics, as well. Because if you can't measure the benefit, how do you know there was a benefit?

To learn more about the link between video and social collaboration, contact Beezy at info@Beezy.net

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