Microsoft has a new Office 365 Video service in store, aiming to make it easier to share multimedia content over a company's intranet.
Simply put, the new Microsoft Office 365 Video will allow companies to upload and share videos internally so its employees better communicate with each other and share content easily, without the need for file transfers. The service first made its debut last November, but only now it is ready to roll out globally.
"Office 365 Video is an intranet website portal where people in your organization can post and view videos. It's a streaming video service for your organization that's available with SharePoint Online in Office 365. It's a great place to share videos of executive communications or recordings of classes, meetings, presentations, or training sessions, for example. Office 365 Video displays a thumbnail image of each video on the site. You just select a thumbnail to view a particular video," Microsoft explained in its support documents.
"If a picture is worth a thousand words, video then makes a James Joyce novel look tiny. Video is a popular medium for effective, engaging internal communications-and its importance is growing. Office 365 Video, too, is growing, providing organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content. And the video experience-embedded within Office 365-meets IT requirements and wins the hearts and minds of users," the company further touted in a new blog post on Thursday, April 16.
"Today, we are excited to announce the rollout of Office 365 Video to all eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. We're also pleased that Office 365 Video 'gets mobile' with a new, native iPhone app and modern web experiences."
To make it easier for users to browse and find what they need, Office 365 Video is broken down into channels. The default channel is called Community, allowing subscribed users to upload videos here. Active Directory, meanwhile, will allow IT admins to manage permissions for certain channels. Several resolutions will be available for all uploaded videos, which means that even users on lower bandwidth will be able to stream content without any hassle. Moreover, an HTML5-based player will enable support for all major desktop and mobile platforms.
Microsoft currently offers a native app for Office 365 Video on iOS, but other platforms will receive native apps as well sometime soon. For now, the new service is available to Office 365 Enterprise and Academic plan subscribers, but Government plan subscribers will also get it soon. Check out the video below to learn more.
