Industry voice: Why you should use SharePoint as a video platform

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Microsoft SharePoint is used by enterprises globally to facilitate collaboration by easily sharing, organising and discovering content and resources, and today's SharePoint managers are under pressure to deliver value.

In the modern age, video is emerging as a content medium of choice, especially for the next generation worker who has grown up with video content playing a key role in their daily lives.

The SharePoint platform, while not built with video in mind, can be enhanced to become a powerful and effective video content platform, catering for both live video events and on-demand video content.

Video often provides a challenge for the CIO and IT teams managing a company network. A traditionally 'heavy' form of content, video files are large and the bandwidth required to give access to a large group of people can keep the network manager up at night.

Enhancing your existing set-up

Whilst SharePoint does provide basic video features natively, the size of video files mean the maximum recommend database size of 200GB is quickly reached.

Videos are also subject to the maximum file upload size in SharePoint and play with progressive download which can cause tremendous frustration for the viewer. Ultimately organisations also simply cannot afford to risk business critical systems being affected, with downtime costing huge amounts in terms of lost productivity.

Due to modern technology however, SharePoint can be enhanced to become the solution as far as video is concerned, becoming a dynamic and engaging source of live video streaming and video-on-demand content.

The possible use cases for video are many, but primarily video is a great tool for internal communications, achieving employee engagement, and giving direct visibility to senior management who can clearly communicate company vision, strategy and culture.

Benefiting the whole workforce

Training and development is also an area where video is a great fit, with content delivered in an engaging manner, available to users whenever they need to access it. Video becomes an organisation's content store of the skills and experience gained by the workforce, with this available for new recruits and more junior personnel to access to enhance their own skills and abilities, therefore up-skilling the wider workforce more quickly.

As a collaboration tool primarily, a video enhanced SharePoint furthermore offers a way to make the enterprise a social one, where video content can be accessed, created and shared easily. Users can comment on videos they access, pose questions, or even create videos in response, creating a dialogue and discussion available for the wider company to access, and join in with.

From a network point of view, an enhanced SharePoint platform manages the load on the network, ensuring business critical systems are protected whilst freeing the organisation to take advantage of the benefits offered by video content.

For those organisations which have invested time and money into SharePoint, the step of enhancing the platform to become a truly video enabled one is a natural step, turning SharePoint into a valuable resource delivering scalable, controllable, and sharable video content to the workforce.

• Martin Nurser brings more than 25 years of enterprise and technology industry experience with emphasis on engineered systems and cloud technologies. He is a leading expert in channel and strategic alliance development and management, go-to-market planning, as well as market segmentation and business strategy formulation.

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