Stream is the video management service of Microsoft 365. Apart from a chapter in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, the Office365itpros.com site covers details of Stream in articles.
Microsoft has announced how the final phases of the migration from Office 365 Video to Stream will proceed. The biggest thing to understand is that you have until March 2020 to decide to migrate or delay – unless you’ve already migrated, in which case you don’t need to do anything. Migration isn’t particularly difficult unless you have done something special to customize Office 365 Video.
Microsoft Stream now has the ability to trim content from the start and end of videos. The feature is very easy to use and is a good way to remove the seconds of lead-in often captured in recordings. Only the start and end of videos can be trimmed as there’s no capability to remove content from the middle of recordings.
The Stream video service now boasts a recycle bin to allow Office 365 users 30 days to restore deleted videos. Stream administrators can access and restore videos deleted by anyone in a tenant. And, if necessary, users can permanently remove deleted videos before the 30-day retention period expires.
Stream now boasts fast access to the video files captured for recordings of Teams meetings. This is a good step because it can be hard to find a specific recording among a mass of other videos. At least, it can be if you manage many videos, which perhaps isn’t the case for the average Office 365 user.
To drive interaction with viewers of Stream videos, you can add one or more Microsoft forms and have the forms appear at different times during the video playback. It’s a nice example of how Microsoft combines different bits of Office 365 to add more value to applications.
Microsoft Stream, the video service for Office 365, is about two years old and the work that the developers have done in automatic transcription is showing some benefits. We took some videos filmed last week and put them through Stream to discover just what automatic transcription can do – and how useful transcript search is.
Microsoft has made the intelligent features of Stream available to all Office 365 commercial customers, meaning that you can now luxuriate in closed captions, automatic transcripts and deep search, and face recognition.
Backup vendors say you should definitely use their products to protect your valuable Microsoft 365 data. Backup products can do a good job, but the nature of Microsoft 365 creates many challenges at a technical level. A lack of APIs is the most fundamental issue, but the connected nature of Microsoft 365 apps is another.
Paul Robichaux and Tony Redmond took the chance to tape an episode of Office 365 Exposed at the Ignite 2018 conference. After uploading the video to Stream, it was interesting to see what Stream’s intelligent voice recognition technology made of the soundtrack when it came to creating an automatic transcript.