Agility in any marketplace requires a willingness to evolve. With the acquisition of Rise Foundation, Perficient’s Microsoft practice is positioned to create, market, and sell products of its own.
Rise Foundation is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that transforms SharePoint for Office 365 or SharePoint 2013/2016 on-premises into an easy-to-use intranet or portal for the business user. But Perficient did not just pick up the application; it acquired the product development team as well. This allows Perficient to develop and support the product in ways that add value to the company’s core services business.
“We have been working with clients to make the most of their investments in Microsoft technology on their own digital transformation journeys, and adding Rise Foundation to our portfolio provides a way to expedite that,” said Matt Morse, General Manager, Microsoft Modern Apps business unit.
Among Rise Foundation’s notable qualities:

• It makes SharePoint portals easy-to-use and reduces the time and cost of design processes.
• It provides a native responsive design to deliver great experiences to mobile devices.
• It provides out-of-the-box features that reduce the need for customization, such as news publishing, professional branding, and social feed integration.
• It can be paid for through a per-user subscription that allows buyers to operationalize the cost of their portal projects.

“In an increasingly competitive and cost-conscious world, we are doing everything we can to provide ready-built intranet solutions for our customers, leveraging SharePoint in the cloud,” said Matt McGillen, Vice President of Perficient’s Microsoft practice.
Thanks to Rise Foundation, Perficient is positioned to include its own applications on the product roadmap for next year, which will add value and open a path for the company to take Perficient-developed solutions to market.

Moving your data to the cloud is not a trivial task, not only from technical standpoint but even from user adoption and business justification. Every organization deal with their challenges in different ways, some take the route of implementing least disruptive workload like exchange (mail) and some go with higher business impact workload like SharePoint Online. Which ever route you take one of the fundamental concerns and asks are always around data security and controls. You would always want your team to have a strong control of security while keeping their day to day tasks minimal. This is where Azure and Office 365 can help you pave the right path while you embark on the cloud journey. Office 365 provides various security controls empowering your administrators to keep their data secure at rest and in transit. One of the services protecting your information while your users are focusing on productivity, is Azure Rights Management Services (RMS).
RMS is a complete end to end information protection solution for documents, email, and any unstructured data that is sensitive for your organization. Highly integrated into Office, O365, Windows Server, and 3rd party applications for broad reach and consistent user experience. It covers a broad range of scenarios like

1. Sensitive information – What (DLP)?
2. Control Access – Devices
3. Tracking
4. Compliance and Governance

Based on whether you are committing fully to cloud or looking for a hybrid solution below are few deployment options
Cloud Ready

 
 
 
 
 
Cloud Accepting

 
 
 
 
 
Cloud Reluctant

 
 
 
 
 
Protecting Information
RMS manages the policy and key exchanges for encryption. Encryption helps maintain the confidentiality and the integrity of the data. The Policy drives who can access, forward, or even print the document. RMS provides auditing information by logging who, where, when, kind of information. This information is key for executives and for compliance reasons. Microsoft recently announced the RMS Document Tracking preview available worldwide. Pretty neat feature which provides you a peek into what’s going on with your shared document
You get an email with link to tracking. From there you navigate to a full list of shared sessions.  From there you can either revoke access, protect in place, etc.

So next time you think about security for your move to the cloud, look at Azure RMS and you’ll be certain your data is protected in transit and at rest, that’ll give you some peace of mind!
Interested in knowing more about Azure security and Controls in Office 365? drop me a note at vaibhav.mathur@perficient.com and talk with one of Azure certified experts.
 
 
 

Some very exciting new capabilities were announced here (Ignite conference) as part of the Office 365 suite powered by Azure AD and rights management service. I will share two of these here
• Cloud App Discovery
• Document Tracking
Cloud App Discovery
With 365 you’re already setup for SSO but if you require some advanced functionality like adding your third party or on-premises apps to this single sign on experience then this section of the Office 365 portal will be very valuable
Once you have synchronized users with Office 365
• In the Office 365 Admin portal go to azure AD. Go to Cloud App Discovery if you wish to add your apps to single sing on experience (Upgrade to Azure AD premium if u want self service)
• With cloud app discovery you can see how many users using which SAAS apps.
• You can view which users were denied access
• You can assign multi factor authentication (even if the app like twitter comes with single factor OOB)
Password rollover- Every week or two users passwords for SAAS apps is randomly changed. So admins also won’t be privy of user password. Initial password is changed instantaneously
Users can see log reports and incident report.
Document Tracking with Azure RMS
• Recipients can download a mobile RMS sharing app to view shared protected RMS document
• Allows doc owners to track activity on docs they sent
○ Who was denied or accessed
○ Various views – timeline view, category view, chart view, map view with geographically location where files were accessed
• Sender gets Notification email with link to tracking site and it will list all docs he shared externally or internally
• Sender can revoke access from document tracking site. Recipients get notification
There were many other features announced at the Ignite but I think these two at the very least deserve a round of applause !!

The single biggest benefit of this new Migration PowerShell API is speed. Close to 5 times faster than CSOM calls. The new API was released today and is available for public consumption.
An Overview

• Source – file share, SharePoint on-prem, potentially any other data source
• Package – create package for the API to be able to accept it
• Azure temporary holding storage – use power of Azure to bring content faster in MSFT network
• SharePoint /OD4b final destination – timer job based import in a scalable way that will not hurt the service using back-end resources

Who is it for?
IT admin and developers
Best Sources
On-prem and file shares in OD4B
Why use API?

• Resources dedicated to ISV and IT admin
• Limited calls to end user entry points, meaning this won’t get impacted by the CSOM throttling.
• Better equipped to scale to the demand

What about Speed?
Type of content does impact the rate of ingestion; using backed resources; lots of small, scenario specific, tweaking that can help get best out of API, preliminary data suggest 5X the speed of CSOM before throttling.
The Flow

• Package is created
• Gets uploaded to azure blob storage
• One CSOM call is made to start the migration process
• Azure queue gets real time updates
• Once complete the logs in the package get updated

Create Package
Generate the appropriate XML to go with the files – resemble a lot to the PRIME package, 8 xml in a package + the content (don’t preserve taxonomy, workflow metadata)
Upload to Azure Blob
For each package you’ll need to have two containers: 1 for manifest and 1 for content. It uses the same queue for all packages.
The Queue and Logs
Use same queue for multiple packages – will get update for job started and completed. The log file is stored in each manifest container (will get error and warning for each log)

It’s absolutely stunning atmosphere here in Chicago. What a breathtaking use of technology and level of energy with 23,000 technology folks here at Microsoft Ignite. It took two full days just to arrange chairs for the keynote!
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about how businesses are being transformed and will be the focus of Microsoft along with end customers. This is the very same opportunity that is driving Microsoft’s transformation. In the past 12 months, Microsoft had significant momentum and that comes from all users. Every business out there is a digital or software company and that creates amazing opportunity for Microsoft. Some of the announcements coming up include:
1. New capability of how Window updates fundamentally change how they deliver security. Holographic computers
2. Surface hub will be displayed today
3. Windows server and system center 2016
4. Azure stack
5. SQL 2016 – stretch your SQL tables to azure
6. Operations mgmt suite – one control play for all security, analytics, orchestration
7. Advanced threat analytics – make possible for every organization behaviorally all of logs and AD to detect advanced threats to isolate them
Perficient has many attendees here at Ignite, so stay tuned for many more interesting posts.
Throughout the conference, Perficient’s Microsoft experts will be available in booth No. 330 to demonstrate how companies can deploy enterprise solutions that promote user adoption, increase operational productivity, and drive measurable business value.

Microsoft has been spearheading the security campaign across cloud services. This week has been in focus with announcements of new capabilities affecting SharePoint Online (SPO), Email, and customer controls. I’ve been involved in numerous customer strategy sessions where similar concerns were raised. It is becoming increasingly clear that customers are expecting higher level of security controls across all Office 365 workloads. The vision has always been to extend these controls to services beyond email.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) has been part of Exchange since 2013. In this post I explain how DLP feature extends within SPO and OneDrive for Business (OD4B). Last year DLP was added to SPO, where it provided capability to find sensitive information by searching and querying the data. This helped organizations to surface sensitive content, put them on hold for legal benefits, and take manual actions (like export). In Exchange, it provided with policy tips and notification emails. It is this capability that is now being extended to SPO and OD4B which in turn means greater proactive control over sensitive data.

These policies include simple “if-else-then conditions” and actions. It also provides preconfigured templates to start from. Users get real time notification if working within the context of SPO and OneDrive for Business

Within SPO and OD4B it will detect if the user is sharing content externally and provide the user with policy tips. Furthermore it’ll go one level deeper by scanning for document metadata.

Admins will get built in reports for incident and tracking

If until now you were on the edge, concerned with the SPO security capabilities then hang on just a bit more until second quarter of 2015 when it rolls out as public preview.

Image source: Office blogs

Introduction

When a search query is submitted to the index, each document that is returned has a search score which is an indicator of its relevance in the current search query and context. The higher the score, the more relevant the item and therefore, the higher it is ranked on a scale of high to low.
In Azure Search, you can tweak the calculation of a search score through an index modification called a scoring profile. A common usage of scoring profiles is Geo-search, which allows you to automatically boost items which are closer to the location of the user. You can also simply boost by pushing newer documents to the top of your search results, or in some cases boost some older documents. It all depends on what your business needs are.
You can configure as many scoring profiles as you would like in your search index, but you can only specify one profile at a time when running a query.

Scoring Profiles vs. Managed Property Weighting and XRANK

For the SharePoint Devs out there getting into Azure Search, Scoring Profiles is a lot like Managed Property Weighting combined with XRANK in SharePoint. However, I find that Azure Search gives you control that allows you too really customize your boosting in ways that SharePoint cannot. Most of your boosting control comes in how you define your scoring profiles in your index, which allows you to really clean up your query on the front end without having to use XRANK. For example, to achieve a simple Geo-search, you would only need to provide the scoring profile and the current location as parameters in your search query.
As a further bonus, you can configure as many different scoring profiles as you would like, giving you full control of how your query gets processed. While in SharePoint, you can only configure a single set of relevancy rules without using XRANK, in Azure Search you can configure as many as you would like and specify which one you would like to use at the time. This way you can specify different weights for different fields (managed properties) when your business needs change without having to completely clobber the back-end index. 

In Conclusion…

Having the ability to change scoring profiles as your user navigates through different portions of your website gives you a great flexibility. You can control a lot of what occurs in your search queries by modifying the scoring profiles in the index, rather than piece together complex queries. It is simply a cleaner way of making things happen.
Stay tuned for some physical examples! For a detailed msdn article, please go here.

Search as a Service

From FAST ESP to SharePoint Search and Bing/Google, search has become an integral point for users to reference their data. Microsoft has developed Azure Search to provide an integration point for a complete search experience. Developers can use the Azure portal and front-end APIs to tune their search index as well as increase and decrease their index capacity, query count, and number of documents. These features allow for individualized, cost effective solutions for all of your search scenarios.
There are already some established solutions such as Apache Solr and Elasticsearch (which is the platform that Azure Search is based on), however ensuring cost-effective scalability and steady hosting can be a whole other task completely. Azure Search’s pricing can be scaled by your query traffic as well as you document count, which allows you to pay for what you use. In the end, all are viable search solutions for your business’ needs.

Azure Search Under the Hood

Azure Search (vs. SharePoint Search)

The core of Azure Search is built off of Elasticsearch, but don’t be fooled, this is not just Elasticsearch hosted on Azure. Microsoft has provided their own API on top of it, which makes interfacing with the engine more familiar to Microsoft developers and front-end developers.
If you were a PowerShell heavy SharePoint developer who used PowerShell scripting for configuration, then Azure Search’s APIs should feel familiar. However, Azure Search does not include a crawler, which SharePoint users have become accustomed to. Developers are responsible for formatting and feeding the data to the document processor/indexer. While this might seem like a huge oversight, content feeders or crawlers are generally not included in stand-alone search engines like Apache Solr.

Why Azure Search?

Search infrastructure has always been both taxing to maintain and often not cost efficient to scale. Azure search infrastructure is fully managed in the cloud by Microsoft, leaving you bandwidth to build you application. As your search application grows and requires more bandwidth, you can comfortably move up the pricing tier, or move down tiers during the off-season.
The management of the data has all been moved to the front end, exposed through a JSON schema API. There are no predefined index schemas or a crawler to fetch data. This is a “push-based” indexing system, which is common for engines built off Lucene. This allows you to easily separate your data pulling and pushing onto other servers and place less stress on your actual search servers. This also gives you full control on when content is pushed and what content is pushed.

So What’s Next?

Go try it out! http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search/
If you have feedback for Microsoft or would like to see what others are saying, please visit: http://feedback.azure.com/forums/263029-azure-search
 

I think that we call now all agree that Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud Offering, is a major force in the cloud computing space for an ever expanding suite of services, capabilities and features. However, in this present age of cloud services, it is easy to not realize the sheer volume of new capabilities, service updates/improvements and production releases that the Microsoft Azure team has released over the past year. Let’s run some quick numbers, shall we:
 

 
For those of you that are more visually inclined here is a graphical representation of the stats above:

 
In summary, that is total of 214 updates last year, with a monthly average of about 18 updates per month. To put this in perspective, think about how many significant updates you made to your on-premises or managed datacenter last year, in terms of bringing more services, capabilities and features online. If you had even up to 100 updates, 2014 must have been a very busy year!
And it looks like Microsoft is not slowing down this year. Last month, 16 service updates were published, a 50%+ increase compared to the same month in 2014. 3 updates were published in a single day in the first week of February 2015, so there is every indication that Microsoft will continue to innovate at a rapid pace and add more value to Azure this year as well.
Let’s dig into these updates to get a better understanding of the frequency of updates that each Azure service experienced in from Nov. 2013 to early Feb. 2015:
Looking at these updates, you will notice that the top 5 Azure Services that got the most updates are (in descending order): Web Sites, Virtual Machines, Storage, SQL Database and Cloud Services. Note that these services map to common workloads and foundational architectural components found in traditional datacenters. In fact, if we expand our scope of service updates to the top 10 categories, we will find that Virtual Network and Azure Active Directory are included as well. In my experience, many of my customers first migrate to these services in Azure, and then start exploring other services and capabilities down the road. As such, it makes sense for the Azure team to more frequently update these services.
Not all updates are created equal. A service becoming coming online for the first time in Preview mode or becoming Generally Available is arguably a bigger update than a specific feature being added or modified to a pre-existing service.
Well, why does this matter? The short answer is you get ever increasing value for your investment in Azure. As more preconfigured services, features and capabilities come online in Azure, you can deploy business solutions faster to your organization, at a lower cost because Azure jump starts your initiatives by lessening the burden of managing technology platforms that are increasing complicated to design, build, maintain and integrate together. In some cases, you suddenly have options that were not available to you before. For example, maybe it is now feasible to implement and regularly test Disaster Recovery for Tier-1 applications using Azure Site Recovery. Or you can finally say yes to your business stakeholders looking to use Hadoop and Machine Learning to help make decisions on critical projects with complex options and possible outcomes, because it is finally affordable.
With all these updates, it becomes just a tad tricky categorizing and tracking new Azure capabilities. To this end, I compiled Azure updates from the Azure Service Updates web site into a table so that it is a little easier to digest holistically. Without further ado, here is the list of Azure Cloud Service Updates for 2014:

CsWebServiceConfiguration Parameter	Description
ShowJoinUsingLegacyClientLink	If set to True, users joining a meeting by using a client application other than Lync will be given the opportunity to join the meeting. The default value is False.
ShowAlternateJoinOptionsExpanded	When set to True, alternate options for joining an online conference will automatically be expanded and shown to users. When set to False (the default value), these options will be available, but the user will have to display the list of options for themselves.

Here are my top 20 updates for last year, in no particular order. I picked this updates based on conversations I have had with businesses globally with regards to Azure:

1. General availability: Azure Active Directory Application Proxy
2. Co-admin limit increased
3. Virtual Machines support VM Agents for Windows and Linux
4. New service: ExpressRoute (Preview)
5. Azure Active Directory App Gallery
6. Azure Traffic Manager now supports Azure Web Sites
7. General Availability: Oracle software on Azure
8. Reduced Pricing on Storage
9. Azure Active Directory Premium
10. Irregular sign-in notifications added to Azure Active Directory Premium
11. New service: Automation
12. General Availability: Autoscale
13. General Availability: Compute-intensive A8 and A9 instances for virtual machines
14. Preview: Azure RemoteApp
15. General availability: high-performance VPN gateway
16. Preview: Instance-level public IPs for virtual machines
17. Microsoft Antimalware and security partnerships with Trend Micro and Symantec
18. General Availability: IP Reservation for VIPs
19. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery: Virtual Machines replication directly to Azure
20. Azure Backup support for client operating systems

I believe all Service Updates are critical and important. Which update made a huge difference to your business, as you talked about adopting Azure Cloud Services for implementing solutions that met your business needs (please leave a comment)?
 
 

Microsoft just launched their Cloud Platform roadmap site. For one it addresses the frequent frustration customers have around the visibility, and second it actually provides a way to be able to understand and plan for what’s coming next. The link to the site is here
This roadmap gives comprehensive insights into features in various buckets: preview, development stage, in the pipeline and the ones which were cancelled. This spans cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Intune, Power BI, and Visual Studio Online; server offerings such as Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Visual Studio; and converged system appliance offerings such as Cloud Platform System, Analytics Platform System and StorSimple.
 

Video Portal was announced back in November with initial push to “first release” customers and a global deployment available by early 2015. This portal powered by Azure Media Services provides adaptive streaming optimized for video playback for the device it’s being viewed on. Leveraging Office Graph, simple drag and drop interface, discover ability across enterprise search and Delve, integration with yammer conversations, and sharing capabilities on mobile makes this an intuitive and engaging knowledge management add in.
Below is a summary of Video Q&A with Microsoft team, MVPs, and community members:
Why does Office 365 Video need Flash installed?
Microsoft is working to add HTML5 video playback support in a future update. This will remove the current Flash dependency. For the initial release, we prioritized security of the videos’ playback stream. We are working with Azure Media Services on new player and detection tech that can get the right player (native, HTML5, or flash) and the right stream from Azure media services, so that we offer both adaptive streaming and security on latest mobile devices and browsers. For native iPhone app, we are using Azure Media Service SDK to support HLS. Browser playback doesn’t work currently for mobile devices because of flash.
What about mobility?
We are also working on responsive pages and will be addressing that as soon as possible. This is our first iteration and we hope to improve on it as quickly as possible to provide the broadest mobility reach possible.
Where I can read what the supported upload formats are and what the out quality is?
It’s all here: http://support.office.com/en-us/article/dd1af01c-fd8e-4640-b… MOV files are a container, and H264 movies are supported and will transcode, but some MOVs won’t work – we’ve a fix in play on this. The ones that do work, which is the majority, get treated like MP4. Once we’re fully cleared on all MOV types, we’ll then list it along with others. The beauty of the service is that it will adapt. As the journey begins we pay attention to fail points, preferences and trends all the same. Thanks for the weight of issue emphasis, helps us understand priority and sentiment to move forward and prioritize.
Is 96 Kbps the max audio rate?
That is the audio setting as of now. We’re open to feedback, and it appears the group consensus is that 128Kbps would be ideal. Consider it passed along to the Azure team to consider.
Are file sizes larger than 2GB possible for O365 Video?
The current upload limit is 2GB, and this applies to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Video. We are aligning with the broader motion that is in development to go beyond 2GB, of which you may have seen the OneDrive (consumer) announcement
What is the storage quota for the Video portal?
Each channel you create adds a new site collection to your tenant. By default no quota is set, rather based on usage by default. More here regarding the usage model: http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/18/sharepoint-online-simplif…. This does apply to Office 365 Video created channels, aka individual site collections in SPO admin center. This is not fully rolled out, but when you have it you can choose to continue to manually associate quota, or simply let it more auto-grow based on usage/need.
How about the storage on the back-end?
Storage is leveraged out of SharePoint Online team site allocation, not OneDrive for Business. We are offering O365 Video at no additional cost as part of an Enterprise suite license, and the service does count uploaded videos being stored in SharePoint Online. We do not count any of the videos generated in Azure for adaptive smooth streaming – that cost is embedded in your overall Office 365 investment.
I read in the documentation that the file is first stored in SharePoint before being uploaded to AMS. Where is it stored in SharePoint? And is the location accessible to us via the OM?
Each channel is technically a site collection in the backend of SharePoint. So yes the original file is there and you should be able to access it with the OM. More here on what happens to a video file in Office 365 Video file: http://youtu.be/HXSZ0jYBKlM
Can we embed an Office 365 Video outside the security ecosystem of our tenant so we can use this as both our intranet video and Internet video platform?
Not at this time. Office 365 Video is currently scoped to intranet. Hence we don’t yet support extranet or internet. We do have technology we can tap into once we feel the system is ready to support these scenarios. For extranet we have external sharing in SharePoint Online that we will consider, and the Azure team is considering the ability to have public/private switch capability – again something we can consider.
How does it work with local charsets? Like ÅÄÖ?
You can create a channel using different charsets with no problem. Office 365 Video supports the same languages as SharePoint Online – in the same manner.
When you comment on a video it makes a new yammer post each time and not a thread of comments? Is this on purpose or something we can change?
We adhere to Yammer’s tech, this is the same Yammer Conversations you leverage for Documents. The player page where you see the thread is a roll up of all threads, but yes, when in Yammer UI or apps, you’ll see the discussion only for that group on that video.
I just uploaded a video to one of my Channels. Is it possible to use it in a Yammer post?
You can start a yammer conversation for the video and that would include a link. It is the pane on the right of the screen on the video playback.
Are “views” tracked using SharePoint 2013-based usage/analytics/search functionality? If so, is there any way to “move” a video and have its views follow it?
Yes, “views” are tracked based on search functionality. However, we currently don’t support moving a video among channels.
We are looking for the ability to include supporting documents with our videos, including Transcripts, Presentations, Contracts. Is this on the roadmap for integration? We are looking for the feature set of the existing Video DocSet with the backend of Azure
At the moment we don’t have an option to include an attachment. We are thinking about ways how we can include that type of content with the video. For today, you could post those files as part of the Yammer conversation on the fly out. We have SharePoint technology today called “Document Sets” that may be where we tap into to enable the association of other materials, plus we’re working with the Delve team on new tech that enables new ways to ‘collect’ items … stay tuned.
Can you block a user so they are unable to comment on videos at Yammer?
There is not a way to block comments on individual videos at this time, but it is a feature request we are looking at. Also, note that commenting on videos with Yammer would require Yammer Enterprise to be enabled for the tenant.
Is there a document that describes the specific usage analytics that will be available in this release? If there is not (yet) then will it track views? View-to-completion (or something similar)?
In v1, we only offer view counts and it is already in the portal. We have plans to support more analytics depending on users’ feedback.
Is there a way to customize UI look and feel? What about custom features like tagging a video? Can we enforce metadata addition on upload as with all other 365 files?
Not at this time, but please add your feedback here: https://office365video.uservoice.com/forums/273864-general/suggestions/6737667-allow-custom-metadata-fields
Is there official guidance on migrating from other video services like YouTube to Office 365 video?
At this stage it would be a manual process. We are working on prioritizing the backlog and two items that are related to your question that we would consider for the future:
1) Ability to bring in YouTube, Vimeo, etc and have them “playable” and searchable in our user interface, but to actually not move the file.
2) Enable bulk upload so you can introduce a lot of new files (think of event capture where you have 300 sessions recorded), and then be able to apply basic metadata about all.
The space that shows used in SharePoint admin of a channel, is that the space of the files that we upload or the space of the transcoded/converted files takes up?
We are storing the original file in SharePoint for later retrieval purpose.
Can we dump the ingested source and just retain the delivery viable transcodes to manage tenant storage costs.
For now our work flow picks up from the uploaded video, which as you can infer then triggers the copy to be sent to Azure Media Services. We certainly will take this into planning meetings to best understand the impacts, benefits, pros, cons etc. Right now we are keeping the original video file in SPO and it counts against your quota. We are doing this to put a bit of a cap on it, but are open to feedback.
Does deletion of the ingested master therefore trigger deletion of transcodes. It simply defines our need to manage upload behaviors to avoid unnecessary storage costs.
Yes, delete from Office 365 Video UI does delete both SPO stored copy and versions in Azure used for adaptive smooth streaming playback.
Can I integrate this to on-prem intranet (sp13)? Will there be an app/webpart?
We are considering hybrid option with on-prem in the future but don’t have any committed plans. If we did it, the idea would be that you can link up your on-prem SharePoint with a video portal in the cloud. We haven’t addressed this yet in the service but are discouraging people from using the existing video features in SPO and want to avoid people having mass amounts of people watch videos directly from SPO.
What are the REST / OfficeGraph API endpoints to pull the videos for a specific channel? Is this documented anywhere yet?
The REST APIs for O365 video is public already but not documented yet. We have that on our list to do. The API has the ability to do just about everything on the video portal, get channels, get videos, upload videos, get/set settings, etc.
The apis are off the /portals/hub site collection…
/portals/hub/_api/VideoService/Channels
We also have an api off the root site collection to find the url to the hub…
/_api/videoservice.discover
We are testing and uploaded five videos so far, but only one is actually viewable by everyone. For the people who uploaded the video, they can normally view their own video. Is this normal?
Videos don’t show up on the rest of the portal until search indexes them. You can only see them in “My Videos” until search picks them up.  It should be indexed normally within 15 minutes, however in extreme cases it could be longer.
 Step 1 is you upload a video to the channel. The video is preserved in SharePoint database. You will see the video in “My Video” tab, which renders using SharePoint database.
Step 2 is behind-the-scene: search crawls SharePoint database periodically (ideally every 15 minutes) to update search database with the updated list of videos. We render “Popular” and “Newest” tab based on search database. They should show all videos uploaded to the channel with a delay (because of the periodical crawl). Thus, ideally, you should be able to “spotlight” all videos uploaded to a channel within a couple of minutes. However, search performance is not as good as we are expecting. That’s maybe why you see a longer delay here.
We do have a bug where videos with certain file extensions (.mov and others) won’t be able to be indexed. We checked in a fix a while back but search DB upgraders haven’t run yet.
How long after upload is a video first available at upload point and subsequently how long before the video is globally viable through Azure Media Services?
We are at about 1-2x the length of the video as a rule of thumb. SP has to upload it to Azure and then Azure has to notify SP its done transcoding. At that point you can play it from the “My videos” pivot in a channel. You still have to wait for search indexing before it shows up in rest of the video portal.
Is there any way to include ‘legacy’ videos that we already have scattered about in our tenant or do we have to ‘move’ them all to the new Video hub/channels?
Hello Jim, this would need to be a manual process. The reason being is so that they are processed by Azure, making them much better for playback.
I created a channel and cannot delete it and now errors out but still appears as a selectable channel. Why?
It is deleted in SharePoint DB but search indexing has a delay so you still see it in the channel list. However, if you click it, it shouldn’t exist anymore. We do need to design the deletion UI clearer.
Will the “Videos” search vertical in SharePoint’s Enterprise Search Center template crawl the videos that are uploaded to Office 365 Video? In other words…can I find videos in Office 365 Video from SharePoint Search by default, or do customizations need to be done, or is it not possible at this time?
Yes. Search from the Office 365 Video portal is scoped to videos within the portal. If you search outside the video portal, from the search center, then yes, the videos from Office 365 Video will also appear. And extra credit, Office 365 Videos also appear in people’s Delve view, now with a new video card layout.
Users will need to visit the video portal to view the video, right? Or will there be a web part to embed a video within other sites in SharePoint Online?
Correct. From enterprise search clicking the video will bring you to the player page of the video portal. We know embed into the rest of SharePoint will be important. It’s at the top of our backlog along with better mobile playback. You will be able to on-hover playback the video from Search Center search results page, click the “…” of the video in results and hover over, it’ll start playing.
Can you include a link to a video direct in a mail like you can do with OneDrive now?
If you are in the portal, you can grab the link and share it in an email just as you would with OneDrive. Note that the recipient has to be internal. It’s a great ask for the future. We have worked hard on the ability to easily share inline via Yammer (Yammer Conversations fly out per player page). And the ease of adding a video from the Outlook side of the house is very palatable. We’re working on new experiences to create new pages in SharePoint, and grabbing a video and including it in a new entity is in the works. We then would need to connect with Outlook to review how we might get into their picker, like OneDrive does for “Smart Attachments.”
Created two channels this morning but neither one of them ended up in the channel tab. The direct link works but forgot to copy the first one so don’t know how to get to it again. Do I need to worry about the SharePoint site it creates, as it has no space or resources? And there was a standard channel from the beginning and what site is that connected to? What about duplicate names?
We will look at the duplicate name issues. We made a change recently to that part of the code and may have introduced some bugs. Unfortunately the channels don’t show up in the channel page until they have been indexed by search. This sometimes can take a while. If you don’t see channels show up after a while let us know, but they should show up in the list after search indexes them.
We provision a “Community” channel out of the box so people can upload to that right away. It’s the /portals/community/ site collection.
Among my channels there is one called Point Publishing that I have not created. Does anyone know why?
There is nothing special about it. We just automatically created a “Community” channel with open permissions so people could start uploading videos right away. Our translation on the channel name aren’t great. Sorry. It will delete the corresponding site collection when you delete the channel.
Can you specify which are the open permission versus the permissions automatically assigned to newly created channels?
When you make a new channel we set the permission to be as follows:
Can Edit – Person who created the channel.
Can View – Everyone except external
For the pre-provisioned Community Channel we set the permissions to let everyone have Can edit…
Can Edit – Everyone except external
Can View – Everyone except external
If you have Can Edit permissions it means you can upload to the channel, set permissions on the channel, spotlight videos, delete the channel.
Will there be a way to grant users the ability to upload videos to a channel without giving them all the rights encompassed by the Edit permissions? I’d like to create a channel for user-submitted videos without giving uploaders the ability to blow away the channel.
We tried to simplify the permissions model and ended up on just the two “can edit” and “can view”. If you can edit the channel you can upload and you can do all the channel admin operations. We could consider adding a 3rd permission level for “Contributors” or “Uploaders”.
If global-admin can’t access every channel – regardless of permissions – then how do we monitor them?
This was by design, but maybe we should revisit that. How do you normally handle this in general? Do you always just trust your admins and assume they will do the right thing and not look at what they likely shouldn’t? The thought was that if you wanted a truly private channel you wouldn’t want global tenant admin to have access.
Is there a way to set this portal to allow anonymous access resembling a public facing site for all to see without having to log in. I set the external and anonymous settings alright but wondering if it can be set as a public tenant?
Right now this is not for public consumption. It’s meant for internal users within an organization.
We don’t have a billing model or plan for how we’d pay for public use. We built O365 Video to be used internally in an organization, not to setup an external public facing video service.
Can an external user (without the need of an O365 account) use a link provided by the organization, to access essentially a FTP site to upload their videos to that would then be available for viewing by the organizationally department that set up the “share”, and published the link to the external user?
We do not support external users on the Office 365 Video portal, or any channel that gets created since these, too, are site collections of their own. It is under consideration for the future, and dependent on us being able to recoup costs from the service when a free person consumes compute and playback resources.
For an external audience, is Azure media services is still the best path to take?
Certainly. Azure Media Services supports a number of custom approaches. They are a world class service that has powered the Olympics in 2012 and 2014, powers NBC.com video playback, Xbox used them for launch, etc. It’s why we were excited to partner with them for this offering to Office 365 customers.
Are there plans to make the video service available to view (but not contribute) for kiosk licensed users?
Our business planning team is certainly aware of this ask, and in concept if they were to be enabled in the future, a kiosk worker would most likely remain a consumer as we have the Kiosk plan defined today (able to view, but is not enabled to upload or be an channel owner).
Any guidelines on the use of this service compared to SharePoint media asset libraries?
Yes… We would like encourage people to use O365 video instead of the existing SP media asset libraries. Asset libraries only do progress download of the videos that you uploaded. So people have to download the full sized video. We’ve had instances where lots of people watching the same video at the same time at an organization have caused big issues. O365 Video is adaptive streaming so you only get a size of video that your bandwidth can handle. And it is streamed out of Azure Media services and has no impact on SPO farms. When you use the video portal you get all the power of Azure Media Services. The overall experience for your users will be much better with the video portal.
Can the Video portal can be turned off?
There’s a good all up admin article here. Enable/disable is outlined at the end of the article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-your-Office-….
 
Future Plans
 
Will there be embed code or links available for individual videos or channels so they can be surfaced on other site pages?
This is a feature request we are getting. It is currently not supported in v1 but is our top priority moving forward. We are looking at much smarter and finer integration with SPO pages.
Will the ability to add other metadata columns be available? Such as Publish Date (for uploading historical videos) or Enterprise Keywords?
Right now, only video title and video description are configurable metadata. However, we are actively looking at supporting more metadata.
Are any metrics coming soon to the application?
We’ve heard this from many customers and it’s on the list. We know analytics will be important. Feel free to add this to user voice and vote it up.
Will the “cloud video” content type be available for other site collections outside of the video portal?
Right now it will only be available to the Video portal channels. We are looking in the future how to integrate this back into the rest of SharePoint and OneDrive for Business but don’t have any committed plans at this time.
What about video to be embedded in the page of content (text and interactive content), so my audience doesn’t need to visit another site?
It is a very legit feature request and it is in top of backlog. We are actively looking into the solution.
Could be integration with eternal video resources like YouTube?
We are looking at doing that. It’s not top on our list but it’s on our list. We’d eventually like to be able to grab an embed from YouTube or Vimeo, etc. and have that show up like any other video in the channel.
Is there a webpart coming so the spotlight videos could be shown dynamically on our Intranet site?
This is one of our top things to work on. We’d like to be able to support embed to other SPO sites.
Any plans to add thumbnail capability?
Yes we’d like to add “choose your own thumbs” in the future. Right now it’s on the middle of our list, but feel free to add this to user voice and vote it up.
Any plans to customize the layout of the spotlight template?
This is in the original designs but ended up needing to cut it to get out sooner. We don’t have plans right now to add it. But add it to user voice and vote it up.
Is there a plan for a player studio, of sorts where customization of playback skin for branding can be added?
We really aren’t considering customized player options at this time.
Is there a way to embed a channel or video in a SharePoint Site? Either O365 or on-prem server version?
Not yet. Up vote that request here: https://office365video.uservoice.caom/forums/273864-general/s…
ETA on an iOS app?
We’ll share more as we solidify our plans. No specific ETA yet.
How will the new Office Sway comes into play with the O365 Video?
Nothing to share at this point, however it is something to look for in the future.
Are there any plans to support synchronized PowerPoint slides and video playback?
We will have Office Mix integration soon, read more here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/18/office-mix-office-365-video/. Help us record/vote the feature requests on our User Voice site: http://aka.ms/O365VideoFeedback. That way we can actively re-ordering our backlog according to user requests.
Do you have plans to include Cortana?
Good feedback. Cortana would be smart as an office assistant. Audio-to-text and associated search-ability are in our backlog.
We are unhappy with the delete process, are there plans for a better tool?
Yes, we are aware that this is sub-optimal right now.
Is there an ETA on fix for this? http://www.benstegink.com/office-365-video-portal-major-bug-…
We have a script that we will be running against effect tenants this week (or a long as the script takes to run) to resolve this issue. If your tenant has this issue is should be fixed soon. [UPDATE: this is now complete].
Will the non-Enterprise plans (standard Business, etc) ever see this feature?
At this time it’s an enterprise only offering, also for Education and Government, with GCC coming soon early next year. The reality of this solution is that it’s embedded into the overall cost of the Office 365 E, A, G investments. The business modeling as of yet does not enable us to recoup per projections of costs for Business, Kiosk, standalone or external users. We are working on ways we can reduce overall costs so that we can pass the value onto to new Office 365 plans/users.
 
 
Source: Office 365 community network

As a technical architect I am used to the rapid evolution of language to describe an accelerating technical world. Only a couple of years ago using the word Cloud would most likely conjure images of the cumulonimbus variety. Today I rarely join a conference call where The Cloud is not mentioned and we can be confident in technical circles that everybody understands the term.

The Cloud

According to Wikipedia, references to The Cloud began as early as 1996 when Compaq used the term in an internal document. Much later Amazon began to use it as part of their Elastic Compute Cloud terminology. We now use the term to describe great new services like Azure and Office 365.

I like The Cloud and feel it is a very fitting term for describing the way we now host services. My compliments to whomever actually first coined the term! It makes a lot of sense.

Now that we have The Cloud we have the premise of On Premises and need a term to clearly refer to services hosted on site (as opposed to in The Cloud).

So, do you say On Premises or On Premise?

Premises

“A house or building, together with its land and outbuildings, occupied by a business or considered in an official context.”
– http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/premises

Premise

“(British also premiss) Logic A previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion.”
– http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/premise

Was it a Mistake?

It seems clear to me that On Premises is correct whereas On Premise is derived from a mistake made and copied many thousands (millions?) of times.

I find the discussion interesting because I think it highlights the rapid adoption of terminology, correct or otherwise. As technical professionals I think we should always strive to communicate better. Describing technology more accurately, clearly and concisely is important and will help us serve the needs of decision makers and users better. I think we should always question the terminology we use and improve upon it whenever possible.