Ready, set, lift-off with video in Microsoft 365

I agree with Greg, I help non-profits with their office 365 administration.  Many of my customers have relationships with city, county and state government entities, links to other non-profits, businesses and community volunteers, elected officials and a myriad of guest users who use Office 365 Groups to manage access to their SharePoint portal.  the inability to use Stream to share to guest users renders it completely unusable.  2 years ago this request reached a feverish pitch with Microsoft saying they had a solution.  That solution was to save videos to OneDrive as a progressive load.  We tried it, and eventually went back to Vimeo because the feature was useless without any way to track usage and views or allow the users to read along.  This killed the ability for deaf users to take the training.

We were excited when Stream was announced.  This tool looked like we could check all the boxes with efficient streaming, auto-recording, video-to-text automation and the ability to collaborate outside the wire.  Microsoft then stated that their statistics showed 80% of the video on the platform was recordings of internal Teams meetings.  I thought to myself, "No kidding, that is the only feature that actually provided any value, especially when I had to download the video, re-render it and upload it to OneDrive in order for any of my partners to see it.  Now the video is in a place where I can't get any usage statistics.

No matter how easy the tools are to use, producing a video requires significant resources: scripting, lighting, shooting, acting and editing.  I, for one, run a company of 50 employees, volunteers and about 140 external partners.  Training = pdf, updates = internal memo, year-end report = PowerPoint.  The only thing that would make me start using Office 365 for video, is if I can direct donors, shareholders, customers, and vendors to specific video channels created for them (office 365 group?).  Otherwise, I will continue to use Vimeo.

I will go through the provided guides, but this better not be a vanity design update.