Tag: Stream

A new tweak to the sharing link dialog used by OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and other Microsoft 365 workloads block downloads of video and audio files by default. This is probably what you want to happen as, unlike Office documents, when you share a video or audio file, it’s likely to be final content ready to be consumed rather than being worked on.

Sometimes the videos uploaded to Microsoft Stream need some post-production work. You can replace a video with a new file and keep some but not all of its attributes. The operation is straightforward and easy, but be sure to keep a copy of the original video just in case you need to revert to it.

Microsoft Stream administration include a Manage deleted users option. However, you can’t manage a deleted user until all trace of their account has been removed from Azure AD, which means that you usually must wait 30 days for an account to be hard-deleted. It’s logical, but not in a good way.

Microsoft has extended the temporary increase in the limit for Live Events participants from 10,000 to 20,000 until June 30, 2021. The extended limit reflects the popularity of online events during the Covid-19 pandemic. After this point, you’ll need a Teams advanced communications license to organize a live event for more than 10,000 participants.

You can now enable noise suppression for Stream videos during the original upload or afterwards. Speech is isolated from background sounds to make it clearer and more distinct. You can apply noise suppression to lots of different videos, but you can’t to Teams meeting recordings because noise suppression is already done for those videos.

The new screen capture option is available in Microsoft Stream worldwide. You can capture a window, browser tab, or a complete screen and have the content uploaded and processed by Stream. The feature handles short (15 minute) videos and it’s a nice way to capture lessons, how-to demonstrations, or even bug reproductions.

It’s very convenient to be able to record a Teams meeting and have the recording processed and stored in Stream. But what happens when the recording fails to be processed? Usually it’s because the account that starts the recording (the owner) doesn’t have a Stream license. Fortunately, the situation is easily rescued.

Microsoft has announced that Stream will no longer create a people timeline in new videos it processes after June 1 and that the feature will be retired. The people timeline feature works well for videos taped in controlled conditions, like studios. It is less successful (and useful) for recordings of Teams meetings, which is where a lot of work for Stream comes from currently.

In a surprise development, Microsoft announced that recording of Teams 1:1 calls is now available. Some limitations are present and the feature seems rushed, but perhaps this is because people working at home on confidential transactions need the feature, In any case, record away!

Teams Live Events are a form of Teams meeting that’s more structured than the regular gathering. You won’t use a live event for every meeting, but they’re very valuable for scenarios like company town halls, product announcements, and so on. It’s easy to create a live event and a little practice goes a long way to broadcasting solid performances.

Microsoft Forms is a great way to build questionaires and other forms for Office 365 (and other) users to answer. Now you can insert media into questions by adding images or videos. When used effectively, the media delivers additional information to help respondents understand the full context of questions before they answer.

Due to the impact of the Covid-19 virus, there’s been a huge upsurge of interest in using Microsoft Teams to work from home, especially for online meetings. Here’s a collection of practical tips about setting your company and personal network up for Office 365 and how to use Teams to run effective meetings collected from a March 18 gathering to discuss best practice about working from home with Teams.

You might consider Stream to be a kind of corporate video portal, but the ability of Stream mobile clients to record, edit, and upload videos makes the application much more useful. People can file video reports from trips, do product reviews, and share all sorts of interesting information with co-workers by using their mobile device as a production platform.

In mid-February, Microsoft will roll out a change to allow Office 365 tenants in regions where the Teams and Stream services are not co-located to record Teams meetings for the first time. This might be good news for you, but it might also pose a data sovereignty issue because once you start using Stream in another region, that’s where the recordings will stay.

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.

Lots of announcements and other news flowed at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference. Here’s a YouTube playlist for four short videos about interesting topics from the conference. We cover Office 365, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and the famous “Office 365 substrate.”

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.

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.