Channels not visible for private group videos view-able by all

[Abhimanyu Singh]

Although I am still grappling with the permissions architecture and groups dependency in Stream for long, I recently gave it a try.

Use case:

Our internal communications team has several videos which they want:

1. All employees to be able to view.
2. Only select members of the communications team should have permissions to upload/change/delete videos. 
3. Non team members should not be able to use any other O365 group workloads (site, planner, team, etc.)

Attempted solution:

1. Use their existing "private" O365 Group in Stream.
2. Uncheck "Allow all members to contribute". This should allow only "owners" to manage videos in Stream, but will not affect other workloads.
3. Create appropriate channels within that Group. 
4. Upload a video into a channel and mark/check to "Allow everyone in your company to view this video". This should enable all employees to be able to view the videos.

Problem:

Although the video is now visible to non-members (i.e. all employees), but they are unable to view any channels! They see only videos. This defeats the purpose of channels to organise videos into categories/subjects. Cannot organise videos based on tags either.

Help/suggestions requested!

[#2]

@Abhimanyu Singh In Microsoft Stream, the authorizations are attached to a video and the channels to the Office 365 Group. With video it is decided who can see it, in which channel it should appear, who can edit it and so on. With the setting everyone, the video is visible per se, but not all channels to which the video is assigned, since the channels belong to the Office 365 groups.

I would define global channels for your application and also include the videos in there. The global channels are the viewer view and the private channels are the creator / editor view to the content.

[#3]

Thanks @Tomislav. But, wouldn’t global channel mean that any employee be able to add / remove videos in it?

[#4]

@Abhimanyu SinghYou are thinking the wrong direction. When you are allowed to edit the video, you can assign it to a channel. The video gets the information were it is associated to. You can not assign videos to channels by editing channel informations.

[#5]

@Tomislav Karafilov Hmmmm.. I think I am finding it difficult to grok! The global (company wide) channel creation tells me this: ”anyone can add and watch these videos”. Doesn’t this mean that any user will be able to fill the channel with videos not meant to be there? (I can’t seem to add an image/screenshot here on mobile!)

Also, the docs here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/groups-channels-organization#companywide-light-weight-curati...

say this: “Everyone in the company can add/remove videos to/from this channel”. 

[#6]

@Abhimanyu Singh Checked it and you are right! If the checkbox "Allow everyone in your company to view this video" is checked, even if you are not an owner of the video you get the option "Add to group/channel" and you can assign the video to a global channel. OK, …

Make your group public with "Allow all membery to contribute" = off. The users do not need to be members of the group to see the videos.

[#7]

@Tomislav Karafilov thank you for helping out. Much appreciated.

Now that leaves me with two options:

1. Make this group public. That will violate requirement #3 of the use case. Any user will then be able to join the group and hence access other workloads (site, planner,  teams, etc.)

2. Create a new public group. That means a new name, duplication of all workloads, and then the end users (especially the communications team) get all confused and mixed up with what goes where and how!

Which is the lesser evil? I wish someone from Microsoft could state that there is another option which is not evil? Ever since O365 Groups concept got launched, I am finding myself in one conundrum or the other every day! 😞 So much for modern!

[#8 · Accepted solution]

@Abhimanyu Singh  - You are right your only options are a new or existing public O365 Group to accomplish most of what you want. 

The setting in Stream for making members viewers only, does only apply to Stream not to the other workloads that come with the O365 Group. 

With your use case and scenario you can't quite get all the requirements covered. We are going to be doing more research and customer interviews in this new year to come up with plans on how to better address Stream groups/channels/permissions. We may want to reach out to you (and others who are interested) as we start our interviews in the coming weeks.

[#9]

@Marc Mroz thank you for the confirmation. I think we shall continue to stick to dumping videos in a document library for now. Stream as it stands today, doesn't provide any value to us. With Microsoft removing the feature of extracting EXIF/metadata data into columns, and unavailability metadata/columns in Stream; things are already getting more and more constrained.

I would certainly like to participate in the interviews that you are planning. Please count me in. Hoping that would help make Stream useful to our use-case(s).

Somehow, I strongly feel that using O365 Groups as the underpinning for permissions is the root cause of such usability problems not only with Stream but other workloads as well. O365 Groups as a membership construct is great, but as a permission model needs serious re-think.