How My Team Uses Office 365 Video to Share Meeting Recordings

One of the Office 365 capabilities that my team at Microsoft heavily leverages is Office 365 Video (O365 Video). O365 Video enables organizations to share and playback video recordings from a variety of devices. O365 Video is backed by SharePoint Online and Azure Media Services and provides an easy to use out of the box experience. O365 Video is one of the first NextGen Portals being released on Office 365.

This blog post will cover the following topics related to Office 365 Video:

  1. Customer use cases & examples
  2. How my team at Microsoft uses Office 365 Video
  3. Office 365 Video key capabilities
  4. Resources to learn more about Office 365 Video

Customer Use Cases & Examples

Office 365 Video is sometimes referred to as a sort of “YouTube for the enterprise.” O365 Video offers a rich user experience which is simple for end users to upload, manage, share, and view video content within their organization. Since O365 Video is a corporate solution, it is integrated with your existing user account and security policies so you can easily control and manage access as well as delegate different permission levels within your organization.

Some examples of how customers are using O365 Video include:

  1. Enabling executives to centrally communicate their messages via a dedicated space to provide video on demand. One example would be for a regular video communication to employees from the CEO.
  2. Having a channel for employees to obtain the latest training materials and be kept up to date on new product features and announcements.
  3. Sharing competitive analysis.
  4. Allowing mobile employees to quickly create and publish a video from their mobile devices. For example, a field engineer capturing and sharing a video while at a customer location.

How My Team Uses Office 365 Video

As a company, Microsoft uses Office 365 Video to share a variety of different videos – both corporate videos and ad hoc content created and shared by individuals in the field such as myself and my team.

My team uses O365 Video on a regular basis to share meeting recordings. Examples include:

  1. Bi-weekly cross team meetings that are organized to help share Office 365 lessons learned and best practices across the Northeast.
  2. Recordings from monthly Office 365 “customer connection” events.
  3. Ad hoc meetings and demonstrations on topics such as innovation management and competitive insights.

Leveraging Office 365 Video enables us to record and quickly share content that can then be consumed by others on demand. In general, here is the process that we typically follow for the content that my team shares on O365 Video:

  1. Record the meeting via Skype for Business (formerly Lync)
  2. Upload the recording to Office 365 Video in the channel that we created for our team
  3. Discuss the video in Yammer in our group leveraging the built in Yammer integration with O365 Video

Office 365 Video Key Capabilities

Now that you have a good handle on some possible use cases for Office 365 Video, let’s dive deeper on the out of the box administrative and user experience for O365 Video.

The Office 365 Video Home Page is the main landing page for your video portal. Administrators of O365 Video can select which videos get spotlighted. Popular videos are prominently displayed based on usage data. Specific Channels can also be spotlighted to be promoted on the home page. O365 Video will only show channels and videos to users that they are entitled to view – if the user cannot access the video or channel, the contents will be “security trimmed” and hidden from the user.

1 - Video Home

Permissions are easy to set and manage. Video admins have the ability to customize the home page and change security settings across O365 Video. You can also designate which users can create new Channels within O365 Video. For example, you could have different Channels for different departments (e.g. Sales, Marketing, HR) to upload and share their content.

2 - Video Permissions

Having the ability to Spotlight videos enables O365 Video administrators to choose which videos and channels get promoted on the O365 Video home page.

3 - Video Spotlight

The all Channels page provides a view into the Channels that are currently available for a user to access.

4 - All Channels

If the user has the ability to create new Channels, the New Channel feature allows the user to provide a name for the Channel and select the color for the Channel.

5 - New Channel

Once the new Channel has been created, the user can upload videos to the channel and manage the settings for the Channel.

6 - Empty Channel

In addition to being able to change the Channel name and color, you can add additional owners and editors for a Channel. You can also specify who is allowed to view the videos that are uploaded to the Channel.

7 - Channel Permissions

Users with the Owner or Editor permissions for the Channel can upload new videos to the Channel. There are also mobile experiences available for capturing, sharing, and viewing videos from your phone, tablet, or other devices.

8 - Upload Video

Office 365 Video takes care of processing the video so it can be played back and accessed from a variety of different devices.

9 - Video Uploading

Users with the appropriate permissions can edit the video title and description. O365 Video also recommends related video content to users and provides the ability for users to easily share and discuss videos with others.

10 - Video Complete

The Share option creates an email message template which you can modify and send to others within your organization.

11 - Share Video

If your organization is using Yammer, then you can leverage the Yammer integration with O365 Video to have a discussion with others about the video and to provide your feedback, comments, and insights.

12 - Yammer Integration

Popular videos within a Channel are automatically promoted and spotlighted on the Channel home page.

13 - Popular Videos

A Channel owner or editor can also select which videos get spotlighted on the home page of the Channel.

14 - Channel Video Spotlight

Here is what users see when viewing the Channel with spotlighted and popular videos being shown.

15 - Channel with Spotlight

If your organization is also leveraging Delve within Office 365, Office 365 Video content is also surfaced and suggested to users based on their security and privacy settings. This Delve integration enables video content to be easily discovered and shared across your organization.

16 - Videos in Delve

Resources

Here are some resources to help you learn more about Office 365 Video:

  1. The Introducing Office 365 Video and Office 365 Video begins worldwide rollout and gets mobile blog posts.
  2. Microsoft Ignite Conference session recordings including: Intelligent, Ready-to-Go NextGen Portals in Office 365 and Office 365 Video and Custom Solutions Built on Azure Media Services.
  3. Join the discussion on the Office 365 Video group on the Office 365 Network on Yammer.