Not much time to shoot the breeze this evening. I'm still in the thick of it. And with the MCT Connect Conference, MWCP and a whole load coming into focus like a tidal wave next month, it's going to be wild. The word bedlam springs to mind. Nevertheless, one of the things I wanted to write about, and then completely forgotten about, and then remembered as I raked over the coals in the tenant has been the new Lists template for video playlists. You see, I did write about a way to do playlists back in june last year. To me, that seems like a few weeks ago. But Microsoft now have something out of the box. And so I am going to deploy it, and populate it, and then I am going to stick that in a tab and a personal app. Now prior to this - full transparency - I haven't tried this out previously. I haven't even attempted it given what I got spinning on the plate, so this will be a pretty functional off the cuff affair.
Category: Microsoft Stream
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Custom Filters, and the strange case of App Governance
Custom Filters. Defined by Microsoft as follows: 'a new feature in Microsoft Teams Meetings that will allow participants to augment their video streams with visual effects such as frames and styles. [They are] built on the Teams Platform infrastructure and provided by Microsoft first and third-party partners as apps and displayed as a collection of filters'. Sound good? Well they have now surfaced into preview, expected GA in February. But if we look back into the history of Teams then filters themselves aren't strictly a new functionality. They have been around for at least three years (half of Teams life): and were certainly being used by IT Pros when custom backgrounds were introduced back in 2020 through third party apps such as Snapchat and OBS which leveraged virtual cam. Microsoft then introduced Soft Focus and Adjust Brightness - which are also Filters - later in 2022. So at this point, we have backgrounds, Avatars on the way, and we now have Filters, too. All native, all options for the meeting. But like backgrounds, and like Avatars, Filters are going to provoke the same questions and spark the same discussions. Can we control them? Do we allow our users to use them? The old famous just because we can doesn't mean we should. Will they be a fad? Will they add richness to the meeting? We come face to face once again with those hard subjects of culture and identity and expression and bias. Luckily, I will leave that to you to decide. Here's how to configure them, with a few pertinent questions for the administrator such as - do they work with Teams Meeting Recordings, and are they compliant to meeting policies?
Let’s Record in Stream on SharePoint
I had a big problem this weekend. After a few weeks of grinding, I was pretty much there or there abouts. Then on Friday I went to review the MS-900 Microsoft 365 Fundamentals course which I am going to teach again next Tuesday only to discover the whole thing had changed. So, let's just say the bank holiday went right out of the window. Bygones. But in doing the consolidation and rewrite of MS-900 I see that the ability to record video in Stream on SharePoint has now arrived in what I assume is targeted. There is always some sort of upside to any given situation, and this is a pretty big deal. Stream on SharePoint is getting to the business end of the transition. I see that message centre says that in October classic Stream will start to be phased out, such as no longer appearing in tenants which have never used it. The player is here. Lots of cool features we never had before like chapters are here. But recording is a big gap and a filling in of functionality we had in classic. It's one of those fundamentals like trim, or transcripts or the Stream app in Teams. So, 2022 continues to be a wild year for Stream. This is a brief look at some of the functionality which is available - but I am sure we will see much more development on this front.
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Let’s Embed Stream videos in Teams – and get Embed Codes from both SharePoint and OneDrive
The feedback about the Stream-Teams blogs has been real positive the last few weeks. And that's all good. Feels like I'm almost back in the flow of the blog writing when I was pre-covid. So let's hold fast to the tack this week and talk about embedding Stream videos. Video embedding involves getting a snippet of code or script, known as an “embed code” - typically from the video and then adding that snippet of code to a site, such as a SharePoint Site. Embedding helps us to surface videos where we want them to be consumed. Now, generating embed codes for videos via the new Stream on SharePoint is not completely straightforward today. It has been confirmed - in writing - as being in development so a button will be there in the future on videos to easily generate the embed code. Yet how can we do it today if we really needed to do that? And not only videos that will be housed within SharePoint, but for videos that will be housed within OneDrive too. This blog builds on the excellent work of Mark Mroz, one of the leads in the Stream Team who wrote some excellent JSON in order to obtain and surface it for videos housed in SharePoint.
Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Let’s build a Playlist Portal in Teams using Stream and Lists – and bringing Lists to a Personal App
What is cool about Microsoft 365 is the synergy between applications. Standalone they are strong apps in and of themselves - but as a former architect there is a real enjoyment about making them work together to produce something which is greater than the sum of it's parts. Now, the last few evenings I have been focusing on Microsoft Stream - long overdue given I used to write about it quite a bit back in the day. I talked about redirecting to the new Stream Web App experience, I talked about the fundamentals of building a video portal and surfacing that in Teams. A little bit before that I wrote on the new chapter functionality and how this will make videos more easily searchable. Now, I am going to take a different tack and bring another app into the fold which is Microsoft Lists. Like Stream, Lists is another app in 365 which I love, and which I use often. Now what this can be used for is to make a Playlist. A Playlist by definition is 'a list of pieces of music chosen by someone to listen to on their computer, phone, etc.' So a playlist could easily apply to video. Let's see if we can make one up
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