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.

• Explore Office 365 Video
• Manage your Office 365 Video Portal
• Start Using Office 365 Video & Roadmap Webinar via @mkashman

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…

Here is our search center after…

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.