One of the many benefits of a Microsoft 365 subscription is the number of features included. Beyond simple email, calendaring, document creation, and storage, Microsoft continues to field solutions to fit all kinds of business needs. One such need is hosting, sharing, and distributing videos in a controlled environment. Enter Microsoft Stream.
What is Microsoft Stream?
Most everyone is familiar with YouTube and other video-hosting providers. Video continues to be the fastest-growing medium across both social media and within the business world. We take videos of training sessions, staff meetings, demonstrations and more. But as anyone who’s ever tried to email a video knows—all that high quality visual doesn’t come small. Finding a way to maintain your video library, without overloading your storage capabilities, is crucial.
Microsoft Stream is a separate, but integrated, solution that not only hosts your content, but allows you to add comments, timestamps, descriptions, and more. It’s available to Office 365 subscribers as an add-on, or as part of the Education or Office 365 kiosk license plan. Currently, you can upload up to 100,000 videos up to 50GBs each, which is an incredible amount of space. Because it falls under Microsoft’s security umbrella, so you can share it with only the people you want. Much like YouTube, you can organize your videos into logical containers—so you’ll always be able to find what you need.
How Can It Help Your Business?
One of the main reasons Microsoft Stream works so well is that it integrates with other Microsoft Online programs. For companies that utilize Yammer, a Facebook-like platform that allows employees to join groups and have conversations about different topics. Say you have a group for SharePoint developers within your organization and one of them holds a training session on the latest from Microsoft. They can share the video directly from Stream into the Yammer group.
You can also add a SharePoint web part for Stream videos, perhaps adding a welcome video from your company’s CEO on the home page of the site. And as any Site Collection Administrator knows, managing your storage is key to keeping your SharePoint working efficiently.
Many businesses haven’t yet tapped into the benefits of using video, either because they don’t know how or because they don’t know where to store their information. But as our phones get smarter and our information gets larger, Microsoft Stream is a great solution to manage, share, and, most importantly, watch videos from your team.