Todd's World: Ian Palangio's Business Productivity : Corporate YouTube, PodCasting and VideoCasting

Corporate YouTube, PodCasting and VideoCasting

Some customers have recently asked me for my thoughts on how to host Video and Audio sharing leveraging SharePoint where it makes sense. Please find my thoughts below – though I’d recommend that you definitely investigate the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS). A PowerPoint summary of the solution features and how it is being used in organisations can be found from PKS Detailed Overview Slide Deck

One of the big considerations would obviously have to be the impact on your network. Some investigation/piloting/simulations would need to be researched to understand the impact of streaming/sharing video and audio in a broad way.

Audio/Video files managed within SharePoint

Internally here at Microsoft, we have a solution called Academy Mobile which allows any employee to upload and manage podcasts and videos. It is a place where our executives place videos on a quarterly basis to give the state of the union type broadcasts to all employees, as well as used as a training vehicle when every somebody has a good idea they want to share broadly.

The solution that we developed internally – has now also been released as an Free and Open Source solution available called the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) from http://www.codeplex.com/pks

Mike Gannotti has posted a video of a 20 minute “tour” of Academy Mobile: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=527

You should be aware that Nintex also has a complementary solution to allow people to record and edit Podcasts to SharePoint using the browser. http://www.nintex.com/Nproducts/Podcast.aspx

I also love the fact that at Microsoft we have an internal service that you can call a phone number, leave your podcast as a voice mail and include some publishing instructions. Somebody will edit it, and publish it on the Academy Mobile site on your behalf. This would be very executive friendly! :)

Windows Media Services

· Windows Server has capabilities – Windows Media Services – that assist with streaming live or on-demand audio and video content. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/server.aspx

· There is a useful technical article that describes how to stream files from a web server http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/webserver.aspx

· If you need a further discussion to decide on the approach to stream or download files – there is a whitepaper that talks about which one is more efficient with bandwidth, higher quality, supporting large number of users etc. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/compare/webservvstreamserv.aspx

· If you decide to publish videos with Windows Media Services you can still embed that content into everyday SharePoint sites with the simple Content Editor Web Part. Mike Gannotti has blogged about how to configure the web part to link to the streamed file: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=1b3bbb8f%2D4b5a%2D4f72%2D94c4%2D94cb80bc3866&ID=1080

Addition bits and pieces

Some technical approaches (ie write code) to including Windows Media Player into a SharePoint Page

http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2008/01/17/media-player-web-part.aspx

http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2008/05/12/cqwp-hints-–-windows-media-player.aspx

Useful tools to record audio and computer screens (very useful for training clips – like how to do <something> on The Point)

Camtasia Studio ($299 but worth it. I use Camtasia for all my screen recordings) http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Community Clips (free from Microsoft). http://www.officelabs.com/projects/communityclips

Posted: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 2:45 AM by ianpal