Insights

Microsoft have been bringing lots of new features and functionality to Office 365 over the past year, building upon existing functionality and even creating brand new applications as part of their offering. It’s an exciting time to be using Microsoft technologies with the amount of investment and enhancements that are being continually rolled out.

We’ve already covered a few of these new offerings, which you can click on below to find out further information:

• Office Mix – a powerful PowerPoint add-in allowing more interactive presentations ans analytics
• Sway – a new web-based visual presentation app that takes care of the design for you
• Delve and Office Graph – the new search functionality to help you find your documents easily

Now, we want to have a look at Office 365 Video.

What is it?

Office 365 Video is another one of Microsoft’s recent offerings, which provides a secure portal for businesses users to post, share and find video content. Video content is rising in popularity and become more common in organisations. Office 365 Video essentially acts like an internal YouTube – but aimed at businesses rather than consumers thanks to its security and integration with Office 365.

Features

Office 365 Video is still relatively new and it isn’t the most complex and feature-rich video platform yet, however as it’s included in Office 365 E plans then it’s an extremely attractive choice for businesses already using Office 365. Also, it’s worth noting that Microsoft already have plans to add functionality and new features in the roadmap, so it is likely to continually improve and evolve – which is important to look for in software.

Here are some of the current features available now:

• Permission levels – Administration can set permission levels for viewing and uploading content and for viewing and creating channels to ensure on those with the correct security settings can perform these actions.
• Create channels – Create different channels to organise video content – all of which can have different permissions attached to them to keep content secure.
• Embed video – You can embed any video that’s stored on Office 365 Video onto any SharePoint portal or website via simple code embedding.
• Native iOS app – Microsoft recently released
• Responsive videos – When accessing Office 365 Video all videos are shown responsively so users have optimal viewing no matter what device they’re using.
• Anywhere access – As Office 365 Video lives in the cloud, users can login an access these videos wherever they are and whenever they wish – so long as they have an internet connection.
• Personal video recommendations – When watching videos users will be recommended similar videos based on their viewing all thanks to Office Graph, which also powers Delve.
• Integrated search – Office 365 Video is integrated with the Office 365 family, so when using Delve to search for documents, Delve will also bring up any videos stored in office 365 Video so you can use one search function to find any type of content.
• Simple sharing – Sharing videos is easy either by sharing via email, posting to Yammer or embedding onto another site – and if the video is sent to the wrong person they can only access it if their permission levels are valid.

Pricing

Office 365 Video is included within Office 365 E1, E2, E3 and E4 plans (and the matching A plans for Education). It’s important to note that Office 365 Video is not part of the Office 365 Business SKUs and it is not available as a stand-alone product. Only Office 365 users on E plans will be able to benefit from Office 365 Video and there have been no comments from Microsoft about the potential to extend this application.

Conclusion

Office 365 Video is just another great reason to migrate to Office 365! The sheer amount of applications that Office 365 now offers in one package gives businesses an extremely complex and robust solution. While Office 365 Video is still in the early stages after being released, Microsoft will be expanding upon its initial features. If you want to manage a selection of videos, then it is a great solution. If your business has an exhaustive video library then it may be worth waiting for a first major update – however we know migration is no easy process, so it may be worth looking into this alternative, especially if removes ongoing video platform costs from 3rd party software.

If you want to see a demo of Office 365 in actions and all of its features, or find out how it could help solve any business challenges then contact us.