Overview videos for solutions content

Thanks to YouTube and the proliferation of video recording and production technologies, we now live in a video-centered society in which a short, focused video can take the place of traditional text.

For solutions content, we can tap into this video/visual-centric trend by producing a short video with an overview of the solution. This video could show the business value, the major components of the solution, and maybe it bit about how it works to provide a big-picture context that will later aid in the assimilation of the technical details of planning and configuration.

Here are some examples:

  • Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365:

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw2FDl33dys:0:0]

  • Quickly create multiple Hyper-V hosts in Virtual Machine Manager

[View:https://media.ch9.ms/ch9/f3d7/d1c3dcc9-c323-45fc-89a9-7aa8d20ef3d7/CreateMultipleHyperVHosts_mid.mp4:0:0]

Questions for SAB members: Should Microsoft solutions content have short, overview videos? If so, what are the key attributes of these videos?

Here is a list to get started (feel free to add):

  • Short (typically 3 minutes or less)
  • Visually interesting (not just voice over bulleted text)
  • Uses standard icons, graphical elements, and constructions
  • Diagrams look the same as their counterparts in the actual solutions content

Another question for SAB members: For the information covered in the video, what is the most important?

Here is a list to get started (feel free to add):

  • Business value
  • Components
  • How it works
  • Overview of the planning process
  • Overview of the deployment process

You can add comments to this blog post, join the corresponding thread about this topic in the All Network group of the SAB Yammer network, or send your detailed feedback to sab@microsoft.com.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Joe Davies