Corporate users of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite will soon have a new tool to share video footage around the office. Today, the company announced Office 365 Video, which connects with SharePoint Online to make it easy for companies to set up internal “channels” for sharing video.
Users can upload a video to their company’s SharePoint site, which is then processed by Microsoft’s Azure Media Services, and served back to other members of the company who have been given permission to view the content by administrators. Once it’s up, users can comment on the video using Yammer, and get notifications about it through Office Delve.
Here’s a video that shows how it works:
This is the first in a series of what Microsoft calls “NextGen Portals” – new services added to SharePoint that expand its functionality. The company plans to roll out several more of them in the future.
Launching new services is key for competing in the enterprise collaboration space these days. Startups like Slack, which just raised a $120 million Series D at a reported $1.1 billion valuation, are growing rapidly and threatening the status quo.
Office 365 First Release customers will get access to the new Video portal soon, and Microsoft says that it plans to make it generally available in early 2015.
