Create a playback portal with the new Stream

The demand for digital content is always growing. To meet this demand, we need solutions that can help users store, manage, and share digital content easily. These solutions should be integrated with other applications in the Digital workspace ecosystem to provide a complete experience for users. One of the most efficient ways to achieve this is by integrating your digital content such as video recordings — Teams meeting recordings and others, into a playback experience portal in SharePoint.

This blog post will highlight some of the benefits of creating a recording playback portal with Stream and SharePoint and how to go about setting it up.

The new Stream on SharePoint

The new stream is built on top of SharePoint and OneDrive. This means storing a video file is the same as storing a word document or a PowerPoint file. This also means sharing, setting permissions, and adding comments on a video is the same as these other Office document types stored within SharePoint and OneDrive.

With the new Stream on SharePoint, findability of video is much easier since videos are now part of the Microsoft graph. This means that from the Office.com portal or the new Edge browser page, videos will now appear in the recommended section under recent files. From the search in Office.com, videos will show in the search results with the option to filter results by video. People cards now show videos created by them.

Videos have become just like any other content that you would store in SharePoint or OneDrive. Classic stream on the other hand was a separate portal at Microsoft Stream and video files in classic stream are stored in a separate location. This meant that the management of videos, setting permissions, sharing videos is done in a separate way. Also, the discovery of videos is limited to the classic Stream portal.

There are now more merits that the new Stream brings over the classic because it inherits the greatness of SharePoint including access management, version control, search, analytics, automations, and even custom video portals.

Increase efficiency

Take recordings from Teams meeting for example. These recordings are stored in OneDrive of the person recording the meeting and auto-expire in 90 days. That means if you record meetings and for those you wish to keep, you either must download them or move them to another location in OneDrive. Assuming you work in a team, and your team has a Teams channel, the associated SharePoint teamsite might be the place to move the recording files. This will save a lot of work in sharing links from OneDrive and keeping track of them.

Moving (or copying) files from OneDrive to a SharePoint team(site) is an embedded workflow. You will find the move/copy actions in three places — the menu, the ellipses icon of the file and upon right-click the file. So, you won't miss it.

Content Sharing

When recordings are stored in SharePoint, managing access to the content becomes easy. Anybody with access to the site can view the content.

To make it easier for people to view them you can feature videos and recordings stored on your teamsite, with the out-of-d-box SharePoint Videos page in a channel tab in Teams. See Microsoft’s documentation for the detailed guide on how to set this up.

Provide enhanced user experience

With the new Stream on SharePoint, there are more possibilities to enhance the user experience — a recordings portal, with dynamic video selection from a list or a calendar view that plays back inline and complemented by contextual information related to the video.

See how you can set this up with the sequence of steps below.

Update the documents library

Open the documents library in SharePoint where the recordings are stored and add a few extra columns as shown below. These columns are to store and show additional information about the recordings to the user. In the below example, I have added Title (column type: single line text), Slides (column type: hyperlink), About (column type: multi-line text), Published (column type: date and time) and Responibles (column type: person).

Documents library in SharePoint

Create a new view in the calendar format.

Set the right permissions

Accidents happen. To prevent everyone from being able to edit the library, set permissions to read only for everyone other than the owners.

Change the permission to “Read” for groups other than the owners group.

Create a page

You can edit the Videos page in the SharePoint teamsite, remove the web parts added by default or simply create a new empty page in the site. Give the page a name, for example: Recordings portal or similar.

Create a new page

Add to the page the web parts below.

Add the file viewer web part

Cancel the file selector that opened automatically.

Add the Document library web part below the file viewer web part.

Select the folder where the recordings are stored. Update the settings shown below and click Apply.

Establish the connection between the two web parts — file viewer and documents library, so that when user selects a title in the Documents library, the file viewer displays the file content.

Edit the file viewer web part and select the ellipsis for more options. Click Connect to source.

Save and publish/republish the page. Now, select a title in the library web part to see it play in the file viewer web part.

Provide context and additional information

When the user selects a file, we will dynamically show the additional information we added earlier to the files in the Documents library — Title Slides, About, Published and Responibles.

Edit the page and add a vertical section.

In the vertical section, add the List properties web part.

Connect the List properties web part to the Documents library web part.

Save and republish the page. When users select a recording, additional information is shown in the List properties web part.

Closing

A recording playback portal made with Stream on SharePoint is a great way to manage and share recordings. It will enable you to securely store, index and search recordings from anywhere, anytime.

Recordings playback portal with Stream on SharePoint will allow you to:

• Manage and playback recordings in one place.
• Provide additional contextual information dynamically in one place.
• Not limited to meeting recordings but also for creating training & pathway experiences where content is video.
• Within the file viewer, during playback, video chapters and transcripts make the experience richer.
• With the file viewer, file types are not just limited to videos but other file Office file types such as PowerPoint, Word document and PDFs.