Organisation Asset Library - Picture Library

[Paul Griffiths]

I was just reading about configuring an organisation asset library and this looks like it could be really useful: - 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library

Reading the document it seems that you can: - 

- Put Office document templates in the asset library and access these from locally installed app

- Put images in another asset library and access these from sharePoint sites

However, one thing that wasn't clear from the documentation whether images can be accessed from office application (e.g. in the same way stock images and online images can be): - 

Is this feature available (and not documented) or is this feature missing.... and if so why! Surely adding this functionality would be a local extension for Microsoft! (Loads of companies have their own internal asset libraries that employees need quick access to!

[#2]

Hey @Paul Griffiths 

Indeed the Org Asset libraries is a cool feature and one that I recommend to most organizations. It is nicely integrated into the image editing experience in SharePoint, whereby it is just a few clicks to get to your org assets. There are some things I'd change, such as the prominence and visibility of this feature. I have heard complaints (and agree) that the addition of the Microsoft Stock Images in this list of options is higher visibility and therefore can work against your desire to nudge users toward corporate approved imagery. But it is nevertheless a great step forward.


You are right there is no integration that I am aware of with Office Apps and it is one that makes sense. Again here we see priority given to Microsoft Stock Images, for example (as shown in your screenshot as well). I also find it odd that we have both (Microsoft) Stock Images as well as Bing Images. I don't think we need both and hopefully this gets streamlined - but such is life in an ever changing cloud environment. :)

I imagine the challenge is that Org Assets libraries can be anywhere in a client's tenant. Therefore the functionality within the office apps would have to be dynamic to the logged in user's attached tenant (as any machine can have accounts in multiple tenants). Not impossible but likely a bit more work.

Great suggestion!

[#3]

Hopefully somebody from microsoft will pick this up. Seems strange to encourage users to have corporate images in SharePoint but not have them accessible when building documents!

[#4]

I agree, there is a growing need to make org images available in the Office as well. Currently, the only way to achieve this is to force library sync via OneDrive, but that only supports 1000 devices and therefore can not be used in most cases.

Hopefully people at Microsoft will take this to the backlog to make the asset libraries even more awesome!