Youtube for businesses? Microsoft introduces Office 365 Video

Office 365 Video still need Sharepoint to work.
Office 365 Video still need Sharepoint to work.

Microsoft has announced a new feature called Office 365 video which it calls a "NextGen Portal" and generally characterise go-to solutions that are often put in place by customers using Sharepoint; these include search, dashboard, wikis, company intranets and blogs.

Office 365 Video will allow organisations to post, share and discover video content within a secure perimeter rather than having to post them to an external third party like Vimeo or Youtube.

The service is powered by Microsoft's Azure Media Services and will be available to all enterprise Office 365 users (E1, E2, E3, E4) as well as Academic (A2, A3, A4) with government plans coming at a latter stage.

Videos are stored in the Sharepoint pooled storage and are encrypted at-rest and in-transit. Future improvements to the service, according to Mark Kashman, senior product manager on the Office 365 group, include broader mobile device coverage, recommendations powered by Office Graph and the ability to embed videos anywhere on an intranet.

Microsoft, it seems, is using the Office 365 brand more liberally with a number of services being added lately like Sway and Delve. Video is the first of these "NextGen Portals" that Microsoft will be rolling out for its enterprise users.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.