Instructional videos, promotional videos, audio recordings of meetings, podcasts… these are just a sampling of the types of media users want to share through their corporate portal on SharePoint. Which is fantastic, because that’s what SharePoint was built for, collaboration and sharing. So let’s go ahead and create a new document library, check. Now let’s upload that fantastic three-minute marketing video. Great!  Now let’s play that video.  “Downloading video” … hey, wait, I just wanted to play it, not download it! Anyway, let’s go ahead and upload that training video… ERROR: “The file size exceeds the limit allowed and cannot be saved.” Wait, what??!! What kind of collaboration thingie is this SharePoint anyway?

Do you find yourself asking these questions and facing these problems? If so, you’ve come to the right blog! Step right this way, and let me show you Video Library.  Video Library is a product developed Bamboo Solutions that allows you to upload media content (video and audio) to SharePoint, and then presents the files in the manner that end users expect. 

With Video Library, your SharePoint environment will feature:

• Multiple Player options — play videos in the media player or via Silverlight, you choose the best fit;
• Automatic extraction of metadata — titles of video and/or audio files, size, and format to name just a few;
• Automatic generation of thumbnails to be displayed in special Video Library views;
• Embedded image script to display video and audio on site pages with the Content Editor Web Part; and
• So much more!

You might be saying to yourself, “but wait, doesn’t SharePoint 2010 provide this capability?” Well, yes and no. Do you have SharePoint Server 2010? If yes, there is a media library called Asset Library. SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 do not contain any media library options. If you’re a lucky individual with SharePoint Server 2010, the Asset Library provides the ability to upload media and play it directly in SharePoint, HOWEVER, it requires an install of Silverlight on the client’s machine. Some other drawbacks to the Asset Library include:

• No auto-generated thumbnails;
• No ability to link to external site videos like YouTube;
• Does not automatically extract video statistics; and
• Does not provide an embed video script option.

So the goal of this post isn’t to talk about all the wonderful features that existed in Video Library before, but to talk about the best feature of all which has just been released in version 2.0 for SharePoint 2010 (both Foundation and Server; sorry, this feature is not enabled for SharePoint 2007).  That feature is the ability to store large files not in the SharePoint content database that results in eating up your site collection quota and valuable database space (oh no, no!), but the ability to store these files into existing network file shares that you have put investment into for years and that is now collecting dust. That’s right, we’re introducing integration with the Bamboo File Share Library! If you aren’t familiar with it, Bamboo has another special document library called the File Share Library that behaves like a standard SharePoint Document Library but with the exception that the storage takes place not in your content databases but on network file shares of your own designation in the library configuration page. For additional information specifically about File Share Library and the recent 2.0 release, jump over to this blog.

With the 2.0 releases of Video Library and File Share Library, you can now integrate the two. When your users upload a video in Video Library, it will upload the video into a designated network file share.  If you delete a video from Video Library, the corresponding file in the network file share will be deleted or moved depending on the configuration of the connected File Share Library.  The possibilities are endless! Remember the earlier trouble we had uploading a large video? No problem! Activate the Site Collection feature “Bamboo File Share Library Large Files Feature” and now your users can upload larger videos (we are talking 500 MB, 1 GB, 2GB files!) while still maintaining the file size limit on your other SharePoint Document Libraries. Pretty cool huh?  We think so!

Want to give either of these products a try? Click on the links below and select Add Trial To Cart in the product banner to download a 30-day fully-functional trials:

• File Share Library
• Video Library

For additional information about configuration of the individual products, and how to integrate them successfully, we suggest that you review our Online Documentation:

• File Share Library
• Video Library