Hi @badgerhicks
We have a similar need.
Our use cases :
"As a marketing manager I want to create information/instruction audio files for sales staff on the road to listen to while driving, because our staff don't get much time to read the campaign / promotional material"
"As a sales person on the road I want to have a company podcast that I can subscribe to using my existing podcast tool, so that I can keep up with what is going on with new product features and promotions"
We have the content : in a sharepoint library as MP3 files with descriptions and titles and other meta data.
Our staff have podcast apps on their phones.
We had hoped that we could publish a podcast feed (RSS / XML) which the staff could add to their existing podcast apps.
The problem
The problem is that 90% of the podcast apps aren't built to secure the connection between the app and the source of the PodCast. They're built for publicly discoverable / accessible podcast feeds.
There are some podcast apps that allow username / passwords to be associated with getting the Feeds BUT most of them send the username and password in clear text over the internet. NOT what we wanted for our Active Directory user's details.
So we came to the following conclusions:
- publish the mp3 files and the Podcast feed on our WWW site but hide it from search engines [for us that wasn't Ok because sometimes future promotions would be part of the content].
- pay a third party for podcast app for our company only, that used SAML or some other method to secure the content and our usenames and passwords. [again not a go for us, due to cost and the fact that it was a tool with only one use]
- use the RSS / XML feed from a sharepoint library where we store the MP3 podcast files. [didn't work for us because we couldn't get a podcast player which could authenticate into our network. LET ME KNOW IF YOU'VE GOT THIS TO WORK]
- solution we're investigating: put each podcast MP3 file into a powerpoint file, export the powerpoint file as an MP4 file, publish the MP4 files to Office365 Stream, teach our users how to use Stream (online and offline) [This was a better solution for us, because it means our staff learn about stream where we do other training and put recorded meetings etc] It isn't as easy as a podcast app, but it is "out of the box" and is using tools our current user licenses make available to us already.
I hope this helps others on the search for this sort of functionality.
Dorje
