Turn Teams Meetings into Searchable Recorded History

Here’s another great reason to increase the adoption of Microsoft Teams in your company.

Did you know, you can turn video conferences, client training, product demonstrations or company announcements into searchable, recorded history with just a few clicks?

This simple feature turns one-time collaborations into part of your company (and soon, your clients) knowledge bank.

How does it work?

You can record a Teams meeting with a click, and then share it to everyone in your company, or selected groups via another Office 365 tool that you already have access to, called Stream.

Visually, Stream looks a bit like Youtube. Except the audience consists of a closed community of your company team, or selected groups within it.

The visual similarity means that the user interface is particularly easy to master. If your users have watched a Youtube video, they’ll know what to do to play and even upload their own videos.

Uploaded videos can be tagged with a common naming convention that all users come to understand. Pro tip: some curation will be required to ensure everyone’s using a common nomenclature or things will get messy.

Tags can become a useful navigational feature. Eg. Tagging company orientation videos with #orientation means that users can access all similar videos by clicking on a single tagged link associated with one video.

Video owners can also provide shortcuts to particular moments or chapters by adding formatted timecodes. Stream takes the common time format (expressed as hh:mm:ss plus a text reference) and automatically generates links to those sections of the video.

It’s not all one-way traffic either. Viewers can read and contribute to comments on the same page as they watch the video, and video owners can respond to provide extra information.

It all becomes a permanent record that adds to company knowledge.

Videos can be uploaded from any source – it doesn’t have to be Teams. Shoot a mobile phone video to quickly explain an upcoming change and you can upload it to Stream in a minute.

And of course, Stream is deeply entwined with other Microsoft products. Do you want to ensure users can easily find your video a year from now? Use the “Share” button on any video page to embed it into Sharepoint so that authorised users can watch it any time. You can also share by emailing a link or publishing it to Yammer to a company-wide audience.

A one-hour video can be uploaded, transcribed and available for searchable playback in minutes. We’ve tested the transcription service using broad Australian accents and… it’s very good. Mistakes are few and far between and not at all distracting.

Tips and Tricks

Set some video policies

You’ll want to set some internal policies around what should be stored for training and corporate memory. Otherwise your digital content will start costing a lot to host every month. That’s why it’s important to work with a partner like computer One to plan the architecture of your network and keep costs under control.

How much storage do you get?

Direct from Microsoft: Stream includes a base amount of storage. A Microsoft Stream tenant receives a fixed allocation of 500 GB of storage and an additional 0.5 GB of storage per licensed user. Additional Microsoft Stream storage is available for purchase separately.

Can you share video outside your company?

Not just yet. But it’s on the Stream product roadmap. Slated for delivery in 2020.

You can expect granular control over who can view, download and share your video.

Want to have a go for yourself?

Assuming you have an M365 Business, Business Premium, E1, E2 or E3 account, go here.

The Microsoft Productivity Suite has really consolidated over the last few years and, in our opinion, is pretty much unrivaled in the breadth of functionality it can offer from a single source. Combined with the Azure Cloud and upcoming product announcements, we expect that the value in the Microsoft offering will only get better from here.