Browse Tag

O365 Video

Adding and Removing Videos from the Office 365 Video Spotlight

The landing page of the Office 365 Video Portal has a top section dedicated to “Spotlight” videos. You can also choose channels to spotlight on the landing page. You can spotlight up to four videos and three channels on the portal home page. You want to use this section to highlight important videos for your organization. All of these videos are maintained manually by users who have the Video admin permission.

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Adding a video to the spotlight is very straightforward but removing it is not as intuitive.

Steps to add a spotlight video

1)  Navigate to your Office 365 Video Portal landing page

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2)  Click on Portal Settings in the toolbar

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3)  Click on the Spotlight section in the left navigation

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4)  Under the Spotlight videos section click on a section you want to add the video to

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5)  Select the video you want to add and click OK (there may be a delay if you just uploaded the video as it needs to be indexed by search first)

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6)  Click Save

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Steps to remove a spotlight video

1)  Navigate to your Office 365 Video Portal landing page

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2) Click on Portal Settings in the toolbar

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3)  Click on the Spotlight section in the left navigation

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4)  Click on the Video you want to remove under the Spotlight videos section

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5)  DON’T select any video and JUST click OK

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6)  You will see the spotlight video section is now empty. Click Save and the landing page will be updated.

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Link to Guidelines – New Office 365 Video Feature

A small feature was released in Office 365 Video that allows the Video Portal Admin the ability to add links to guidelines, help documents, or other information directly on the video portal itself.  The primary use case for this is to grant the ability to provide easy access to IT help documentation and guidelines as it relates to Office 365 Video.  The new guidelines section has the ability to add 2 links to different pages.

  1.   The Video Portal landing page
  2.   The Video upload page

Examples of guidelines that you could link to here could be:

  • Who are the current channel owners who can upload videos
  • What are the agreed upon company standards for types of videos that can be uploaded
  • What are the penalties if you don’t follow the guidelines
  • What are the technical upload limitations
  • Who to contact if there are issues
  • Or even a video explaining all of this!

The guideline links could be links to anything from an office document to a SharePoint page you created to an external website.  When the guideline buttons are clicked they link will always be opened in a new tab.

Here are the steps to setup the guidelines and what it looks like in the end…

1)  Navigate to your Office 365 Video Portal landing page by clicking on the the Video icon through the app launcher

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2)  Click Portal Settings in the video portal ribbon

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3)  Click Link to guidelines in the left navigation

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4)  Enter the links to the guidelines that you want to have available and click Save.  The “Video guidelines” link will be on the home page while the “Upload guidelines” link will be on the upload page.

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5)  Navigate back to your home page and check out your new link

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6)  Click on the Upload button see your other guideline link

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This is just one of the great new features that keep rolling out from the Office 365 Video team!

Disabling Office 365 Video

I don’t really want to write this post as I believe everyone who has Office 365 and appropriate licenses for Video should be looking at it, but I have worked with quite a few clients recently and understand the need to control the release of features.  When Office 365 Video was announced a few years ago it came with little fanfare as it was really just the beginning of an enterprise video solution. Over the past year the solution has continued to evolve and is now becoming a valuable tool in the tool-belt of Office 365.

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When you sign up for Office 365 you are at the mercy of Microsoft as far as the releasing of new technology. This is normally a new release philosophy that your company will need to evolve into. There are different ways to control the flow of information being release in Office 365 using things like First Release or even another tenant but this post is specific to the scenario controlling Office 365 Video.

To start…all of this information is only as valid as to when this post was written (April 2016).  As O365 is changing often this may not be how to do this in the future.

A few quick notes:

  • By default the Office 365 Video portal is turned on
  • By default anyone who has an appropriate license can create channels
  • The Video tile will be available to anyone who has an appropriate license
  • The Office 365 Video portal hub is a site collection in SharePoint Online

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Steps to disable the Office 365 Video Portal

1 – Navigate to your SharePoint Online Admin Center

  • Option 1:  Direct URL (replace contoso with your tenant info):  https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com
  • Option 2:  Navigate to Office 365 Admin Center -> Use the left navigation to open the SharePoint Admin Center

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2 – Click “settings” in the left navigation of the SharePoint Admin Center

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3 – Scroll down down to the section titled: “Streaming Video Service”

  • Check “Disable streaming video through Azure Media Services and disable the Video Portal”

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  • Click “OK” at the bottom of the page

4 – Wait….Wait…..keep waiting….It will take a few minutes for the tile to be removed.

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5 – If you try to navigate directly to the Video portal url (https://contoso.sharepoint.com/portals/hub) you will now see a new message

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How to Promote Office 365 Video Search Results in SharePoint

The Office 365 Video portal is a great solution for managing videos. It is much better than trying to host videos in a standard site collection in SharePoint Online. I don’t want to go into the Office 365 Video portal in this post but here are some great starting points.

After using the Office 365 Video portal both internally and with clients there was one area that I wanted to try to improve on, searching and finding. The majority of clients I work with have a standard intranet with many now being hosted in SharePoint Online. When I help with intranet builds I try to incorporate the search center as a key piece of functionality. In Office 365, this is a prebuilt site collection under the URL – https://domain.sharepoint.com/search.

With the search center, I try to include core metadata that can be used as refinement when possible. As the search center can be a central area for functionality I wanted to try to improve the usability of the current Videos vertical refiner with better incorporation of videos hosted in the Office 365 Video portal. Office 365 Videos are already returned in search results via this refiner but this will most likely also pull junk videos people have uploaded across SharePoint.  So I was looking for a way to clean this up.

  • A simple solution to hide junk videos is to promote all videos that are hosted in the Office 365 Video portal above any other items being returned through the Videos search results through a query rule.

Here was our search center before…

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Here is our search center after…

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As you can see the videos that we want people to see are now front and center.  I also added the Content Type refiner so people could pick other Content Types besides Cloud Video.

Steps to build the query rule

** As a reference I am building this query rule just on the Search site collection.  This could be done at the tenant level as well.  **

  1. Navigate to your search center as someone who has site collection administration
    • https://domain.sharepoint.com/search
  2. Use the gear to go to Site Settings.   Under Site Collection Administration click Search Query Rules
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  3. Click the Select a Result Source… drop down and select Local Video Results (System)
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  4. Click New Query Rule
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  5. Give it a name (i.e. Video Portal Promotion)
  6. Under Query Conditions, click Remove Condition. We are selecting this because we want this to fire on all events.
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  7. Under Actions, click Change ranked results by changing the query
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  8. Under the Sorting tab, change the Sort by to be by Rank
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  9. On the same sorting tab, click Add dynamic ordering rule
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  10. Now we get to change the ranking.  On the first drop down select Manual condition.  In the manual condition, we only want to return videos from the O365 video portal.  To do this we will filter by the ContentTypeID.  There is a new content type called “Cloud Video” that is published with videos in the O365 video portal.  The last section of the ContentTypeID is not consistent across channels (site collections) but the beginning string is.  Here is the condition:
    • ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012*
  11. Ensure the last drop down states Promote to top and then click OK and Save.
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  12. Sit back and look at your great new query rule
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  13. Now if you run a search your good videos will always be before your bad videos
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The last step you could do is add the Content Type option as a refiner.  This is done through editing the page and editing the refiner web part.

With videos being available in search and the power of Display Templates in SharePoint, this could be just the start of integrating videos back into your SharePoint sites and user experiences.