Controlling Stream Video Versions Designed to Consume Less Disk Storage

Microsoft 365 message center notification MC797116 (30 May 2024, Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 395380) addresses the question of storage consumption in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business for videos managed by Stream. The issue is simple. Any time a video owner updates the non-video content, Stream creates a brand-new version of the video that consumes the same amount of storage as the original.

Many reasons exist to change something for a video, like editing the metadata (title, description (Figure 1), or chapters), editing the transcript to correct flaws in the automatic text generated by the transcription bot, adding callouts through the interactivity feature, and so on.

Many Stream Video Versions

Behind the scenes, SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business treat changes to non-video content in the same way as they handle changes made to Word documents or Excel spreadsheets and create new versions. The impact on storage is obvious if you look at the version history for a video. Figure 2 shows the version history for a 402 MB video that consumes 5,226 MB for the 13 versions stored by OneDrive.

Usually, this method of storing versions doesn’t affect OneDrive for Business accounts. Given that most videos are likely Teams meeting records, few videos are updated, and the version count remains small. In addition. The large storage quotas assigned to OneDrive for Business accounts accommodate a few extra versions without a problem.

The issue is more obvious in SharePoint Online where the tenant-wide storage quota comes under pressure from user demand for document storage, retention processing, and versioning. Buying additional SharePoint Online storage is expensive, and few tenants want to go down that route.

Microsoft announced intelligent versioning for SharePoint Online in July 2023, but according to Microsoft 365 roadmap item 145802, the rollout won’t happen until August 2024. Good things take time to get right.

The Change in the Creation of Stream Video Versions

The change Microsoft is introducing to Stream starting mid-July 2024 with the intention to complete worldwide deployment by late August 2024 is to stop generating new versions of videos for changes that do not affect video content. This is a reasonable approach, and it will prevent the kind of video version sprawl seen in the past (as obvious in Figure 2).

The downside is that metadata changes made to Stream videos are irrecoverable. If you restore a version of a video, you get the metadata available at that time. Any subsequent changes made to video metadata are ignored.

These actions no longer create a new version:

• Editing the title or description from within the Stream browser client.
• Adding or editing chapters, transcripts, captions, or interactivity (callouts or forms).
• Toggling media settings (show/hide about video, chapters, interactivity, comments, analytics, etc.).
• Adding audio tracks.

Any change that affects the video content, like trimming some seconds from the start or end of a video, will force Stream to generate a new version of the video. Once the change reaches your tenant, it goes into effect and cannot be reverted to the previous behavior. The change has no effect on existing videos and will not remove any versions that are already being stored. Microsoft says that if you want to remove extraneous versions, you’ll need to wait for SharePoint Intelligent versioning to appear in your tenant and use that to clean up unwanted video versions stored in SharePoint sites.

Storage is Not a Pressing Problem for OneDrive

At this point, I am unsure if the same approach can be taken to clean up video versions in OneDrive for Business accounts. However, given that storage is much less of an issue in OneDrive than it is in SharePoint Online, and that Teams meeting recordings age out over time, this is probably not a big problem. If you’re worried about OneDrive, run the OneDrive for Business account storage and quota report and see if any account needs attention. I bet hardly any will.

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An Overlooked Feature to Block Downloads for Channel Meeting Recordings

Given the size of Microsoft 365 and the fact that you might not use some app features very often, a good likelihood exists that you’ve never heard of some features. Or you might have forgotten that a feature exists. I experienced this feeling during the review of the Managing Videos chapter for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook (2025 edition) when Vasil Michev, our technical editor, pointed out that the chapter didn’t mention the ChannelRecordingDownload setting for the Teams meeting policy.

This oversight on our part is inexcusable. The setting has existed for quite a while. It’s mentioned in message center notification MC222640, updated August 2, 2021, and our sole excuse is that this update occurred with a bunch of other changes intended to facilitate the migration of Stream classic to Stream on SharePoint. We’ll address the deficit here.

Updating Meeting Policies to Block Download Access for Channel Meeting Recordings

By default, the value of the ChannelRecordingDownload setting in Teams meeting policies is “Allow.” This means that the SharePoint app (app@sharepoint) saves recordings of channel meetings in the Recordings folder for the channel. For instance, recordings for meetings hosted in the General channel end up in General\Recordings while recordings for meeting in a shared channel end up in the Recordings folder. Private channels don’t have a mailbox and don’t support channel meetings. All channel members have access to the MP4 files created for recordings, including the ability to download the files.

Updating the ChannelRecordingDownload setting to block access to channel meeting recordings is not supported by the Teams admin center Instead, use the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet from the Teams PowerShell module to update Teams meeting policies. For example:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Allow Meeting Recording" –ChannelRecordingDownload Block

You might also need to run the Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet to assign the updated policy to the set of accounts that you want to block from downloading.

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -PolicyName "Allow Meeting Recording" -Identity Ken.Bowers@office365itpros.com

Where Channel Meeting Recordings Go

After updating the meeting policy, SharePoint applies different rules to the storage of and access to channel meeting recordings. Remember that a channel meeting doesn’t really have an owner or organizer. The person who creates a channel meeting acts as the organizer in that they manage invitations and other meeting settings. However, they do not own the recording in the same way as they would for a personal meeting.

When saving channel meeting recording in SharePoint Online, the SharePoint app checks the meeting policy assigned to the organizer and finds that the policy blocks downloads for channel meeting recordings. Instead of saving the MP4 file in the Recordings folder, it saves the file in the Recordings\ViewOnly folder and alters permissions on the file so that only channel owners can download the recording. Everyone else, including the meeting organizer (unless they are also a channel owner) are limited to online view-only access (Figure 1).

The Microsoft documentation offers sparse information on this point and a quick internet search didn’t turn up much else. I guess everyone else missed this change.

The Can View Only Permission

In other related news, an associated change described in message center notification MC699712 (19 December 2023) might also have escaped your attention. This is the update for the share link settings for Stream videos stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.

The change introduced the “Can view, but not download” option to the permission drop down (Figure 2) to make it easier for people to share videos that they didn’t want downloaded. It was possible to block downloads for video files beforehand, but it required additional steps to block downloads.

channel member creates a sharing link for a video file in the \ViewOnly folder, they’re restricted to sending a sharing request to the channel owners to request access. This occurs even when sharing with other channel members, even though those channel members already have access.

The Joy of Finding an Overlooked Setting

I’m not particularly worried about the downloading of my videos that other users have access to through Stream. However, I can understand that this might be a concern for others, and it’s good that Microsoft 365 includes controls to limit access in a reasonably painless manner, even if I have totally overlooked the settings for years.

Learn about using Stream on SharePoint and the rest of Office 365 by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Use our experience to understand what’s important and how best to protect your tenant.

New Features Show up in Stream Browser Client

The migration period for Stream classic to Stream on SharePoint finished on April 15, 2024. Given that Stream no longer has a management client because everything’s handled by SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, it’s possible that Stream slipped down the list of tenant administrator priorities once the migration finished. Development continues on the Stream browser client (but Microsoft plans to retire the Stream mobile client on 1 July 2024), and three recent advances deserve some attention.

Copilot for Stream

Message center notification MC765809 (2 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 188616) announces the arrival of Copilot for Stream. This only matters if a tenant has Copilot for Microsoft 365, but I think its arrival underscores the importance of transcripts.

Most people are familiar with Teams recording transcripts and know that the transcript is basis for Copilot party tricks like extracting a list of action items or summarizing what happens during a meeting. At one time, Microsoft stopped creating transcripts for videos uploaded to Stream, possibly because the transcripts complicated the migration process. However, this point passed and Microsoft resumed the generation of transcripts following the upload of video files in mid-2023. If a video doesn’t have a transcript, it’s easy to generate one.

Once a transcript is available, Copilot for Stream can use it to do much the same thing as it does for Teams meeting recordings:

• Summarize what happens during the video.
• Create a list of action items.
• Ask questions about who said what.
• Ask if specific topics are discussed in a video.

Figure 1 shows Copilot for Stream after generating a list of actions from a video (which happens to be a Teams meeting recording featuring the awesome talent of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook author team).

Video Trimming

The old Stream client could trim content from the start and end of videos. However, this meant regenerating video files, and that took some time. Today, Stream uses a different approach. Instead of removing parts of a video from the start, end, or middle, Stream hides content based on time codes. For example, you can tell Stream to hide the first fifteen seconds of a Teams meeting recording to avoid viewers having to watch the Teams recording introduction screen. Trimming a video in this manner avoids the need to regenerate an edited video without the trimmed sections. When the time comes to play the video, Stream simply ignores the trimmed sections.

Hidden content is always available to video owners and others with full access. The trimmed sections are viewable if someone downloads and plays a copy of the video. In addition, trimming doesn’t affect the transcript and although Stream doesn’t display the parts of the transcript for trimmed section, the full text is available for eDiscovery and for Copilot to process. For these reasons, if you want a video where it is impossible for viewers to access removed content, use a tool like Clipchamp to regenerate a new version of the video after removing the parts you don’t want people to see. Stream should then produce a transcript for the new video that reflects the edited content.

Video Interactivity

The interactivity feature of the Stream player supports the addition of elements at specific time codes within a video. You can add:

1. Forms. Insert a link to a Microsoft form (created beforehand) for display to viewers starting at a timecode. A form can conduct a survey, poll viewers, or quiz the viewers about the content of the video.
2. Callouts. Add a text or hyperlink callout to display to viewers between two timecodes. This function can be used to highlight important points in a video with a couple of lines of text. The callout editor is rudimentary and supports the selection of a limited range of colors. You can insert multiple callouts in a video.

The ability to add forms to a video is covered in MC688632 (3 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap 180796), while callouts are covered in MC688631 (last updated 4 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 180795)

During my testing, I discovered that adding a callout to a video often caused Stream to become unresponsive to a point where I had to kill the page. Do not attempt to add a callout (or form) when playing a video! Make sure that it’s stopped, else a high chance of something going wrong happens. Maybe I’m just unfortunate or the problem was with the Edge browser. In any case, Figure 2 shows what a callout (with text and a hyperlink) added to a video looks like.

As noted above, Stream displays a callout for a defined period. This could be the complete video or just specific sections.

Keep an Eye on Stream

I confess it had been a while since I took a detailed look at the Stream client to acquaint myself with recent developments and new features. As is the norm within a Microsoft 365 tenant, other things had demanded attention and stole time, or maybe it was just that I now expect the Stream client to work without me having to think too much about what’s going on. In any case, the new features are welcome, even if you don’t have Copilot.

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Stream Mobile App Cut from July 1, 2024

Microsoft’s announcement in message center notification MC789607 (2 May) that they plan to retire the Stream mobile client for iOS (Figure 1) and Android on July 1, 2024, is not unexpected. It follows the completion of the long-running migration from the Stream Classic platform to Stream on SharePoint on April 15, 2024.

The (sparse) documentation for the change says that Microsoft is retiring the Stream mobile client as they “continuously strive to improve and unify our services.” More likely it’s simple rationalization. How many mobile apps does Microsoft need to upload and view videos stored in Microsoft 365. And because the focus of video storage is now OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, the OneDrive app was never going to be rationalized, even if its mission to handle all file types means that it pays less attention to video than a dedicated video app. The same is true for the Microsoft 365 mobile app, the other alternative nominated by Microsoft.

Microsoft says that their future investment will be in the OneDrive and Microsoft 365 mobile apps. Presumably this refers to investments to improve support for video files rather than just generally.

Block Download Policy

In MC789607 Microsoft calls out a potential change in behavior that users might encounter. The Stream mobile app doesn’t support the SharePoint Online block download policy, which is designed to block downloads of sensitive material from sites. The OneDrive and Microsoft 365 apps do apply the policy, meaning that users are forced to watch videos online if files are stored in sites protected by the block download policy.

I’m not sure that this will be a big concern for many customers because the block download policy is designed to protect sensitive sites that probably don’t hold many videos. I might be wrong, and there’s certainly a case for protecting videos about new products and other confidential material, but in the general course, I think the majority of the 400 mil users won’t notice any difference in viewing videos.

Usage of the Stream App

A note in the announcement says:

“If you would like more information about how many users in your organization are using the Stream mobile apps, please email us at streammobileapp@microsoft.com.”

If you think this seems a tad odd, you’d be right. It’s very strange to send email to a Microsoft development group to ask them to provide information about the usage of an app within a tenant. I bet that the folks lined up to process these emails really appreciate the chance to extract statistics for tenants.

What this statement underlines is the lack of usage data published for Stream in the Microsoft 365 admin center or available through the Graph Reports API. Stream is not alone in this respect. Despite having a usage dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a notable absence in the list supported by the API.

Retiring the Steam Mobile App is a Bump in the Road

Overall, I suspect that the retirement of the Stream mobile app will be a bump in the road: unnoticed by most but a pain for those who hit it. Rationalization occurs all the time and given the size of Microsoft 365 and the number of workloads it spans, it’s likely that good candidates exist for future rationalization. Expect similar stories to emerge in the future.

Thanks to Microsoft for announcing a change like that just after we shipped the May 2024 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. The only good thing about changes like this is that they show the value of a book that’s constantly updated to stay up-to-date with what happens inside Microsoft 365.

Standard Stream Audit Events and Advanced Events

In yesterday’s article about updates for the Stream browser app, I noted the slippage in the advertised delivery dates for some of the features. At least, the updates haven’t yet arrived in my tenant or the other tenants I have administrative access to. Delays happen in software development. Losing a few days here and there is part of software life.

The same applies to message center notification MC686916 (3 November 2023), which predicted the availability of five advanced Stream audit events to tenants with Microsoft Purview Audit standard (essentially, Office 365 E3 and above) by the end of November. The same dates appear in Microsoft 365 roadmap item 180738.

Improving Audit Availability for Purview Standard Customers

Making advanced audit events available to more tenants is part of Microsoft’s initiative to increase access to Purview audit data announced in July 2023 following government criticism that too much audit data required premium access. The follow up note of October 18 details the changes Microsoft plans to make, including extending the retention period of audit events from 90 to 180 days for Purview Audit standard customers. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been slow to make the changes with the MailItemsAccessed event due to reach tenants in June 2024.

The advanced audit Stream events are:

• StreamInvokeGetTranscript
• StreamInvokeChannelView
• StreamInvokeGetTextTrack
• StreamInvokeGetVideo
• StreamInvokeGroupView

No good explanation exists online about the circumstances that cause the generation of these events. When I find out, I’ll update this post.

Apparently, the events should be generated by tenant activity now, but I don’t see any trace of them. Perhaps I’m not taking the necessary actions to provoke the creation of the advanced events, like fetching a transcript.

Stream Standard Audit Events

In any case, Stream Classic uses Azure storage to hold its videos and generates a dedicated set of audit events. The existence of dedicated events makes it much easier to query the unified audit log to discover information about who’s doing what with videos. Because the new Stream is based on SharePoint Online, audit events for actions like the creation of a new video show up just like the creation of a new Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Thus, you end up looking for:

• FileUploaded: A user uploads a video to Stream that’s stored in either SharePoint Online (for instance, if uploaded to a Teams channel) or OneDrive for Business. Teams meeting recordings are perhaps the most common example of Stream uploads (this article describes how to extract audit information for Teams recordings).
• FileModified: A user modifies an item stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business. An example of a Stream file modification is when a video owner updates the settings for a video, like adding a description.

You could also include FileAccessed, which is the event logged when a user accesses a file stored in SharePoint Online. Each time someone views a Stream video, SharePoint Online logs a FileAccessed event.

A Small Part of the Changeover to the New Stream

The change in storage platform means that any script that fetches and analyzes Stream audit events must be updated. Older scripts use the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet (Graph access to audit events is coming), so you need to check the code to make sure that the search finds the correct events and respects the unannounced and so far unexplained change introduced by Microsoft in September 2023 by including the SessionCommand parameter.

Because the Stream data are amidst a mass of other SharePoint Online document events (in particular, most tenants generate many FileAccessed and FileModified events daily), some work is necessary to extract the Stream events. The best method I’ve come up with is to look for events relating to files with .mp4 and .wbem extensions. The latter is the extension for videos generated by users using the Stream camera and screen recording options. I’ve created a script to show how, which you can download from GitHub. Figure 1 shows the output.

Some Stream-specific events are available such as actions logged for transcript creation, deletion, and access. This code finds those audit records

$Operations = "FileTranscriptContentAccessed", "FileTranscriptCreated", "FileTranscriptDeleted"
[array]$Records = (Search-UnifiedAuditLog -Operations $Operations -StartDate $StartDate -EndDate $EndDate -Formatted -ResultSize 5000 -SessionCommand ReturnLargeSet)

Have fun with the final stage of the transition to Stream on SharePoint!

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Enhancements to Stream Browser App Make it Easier to Consume Video

Stream’s proclaimed mission is to make video as easy to work with inside Microsoft 365 as documents and email are. We’re in the final stages of the transition from Stream Classic to Stream on SharePoint. The reminder published in message center notification MC703758 says that Microsoft will close down Stream classic on April 15, 2024 and remove any remaining videos stored in that platform after that date. In other words, it’s way past the best time to migrate.

With that cheery thought in mind, let’s do a quick fly-past of recent developments in Stream.

Changes to Stream Browser App

Although Stream is embedded in many places within Microsoft 365, the browser app is the most obvious instantiation of Stream. It’s the app launched when users select Stream from the app menu. A bunch of small but important changes have appeared in Stream that might have escaped your attention. For instance, Microsoft has given the Stream browser app a visual makeover (Figure 1) to include new choices for filtering and a screen recording capability (the old ‘recording’ option is now ‘camera recording’). The filtering options include fast access to Teams meeting recordings and the videos you’ve shared with others.

Stream in Teams

Examples of where Stream shows up elsewhere in Microsoft 365 include the Stream web part for SharePoint pages, the Stream app in Teams (really just a version of the Stream browser app), and being able to preview and play Stream videos inline in Teams chat and channel conversations. The latter functionality is covered by MC649917 (last updated 15 December 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 127596) and it’s taken a while to deploy. The latest update is that deployment should complete worldwide by the end of January 2024.

What this means is that people can copy a link for a video from the Stream browser app and insert it into a Teams message. In the example shown in Figure 2, the video is stored in a SharePoint document library. The nice thing is that the viewers don’t need to know anything about where a video comes from (the location is shown beneath the video if someone really wants to know). The important thing is if the link allows access, users can play the video inline and have access to features like the transcript, chapters, and comments.

Share but No Download

Speaking of sharing, message center notification MC699712 (December 19, 2023) announced a change to the sharing link setting with the addition of the “Can view, but not download” option to the permission drop down. This change is supposed to hit targeted release tenants in mid-December, but I haven’t seen it yet and still have the old sharing experience (Figure 3).

Some folks are unaware that you can send sharing links which block downloads, so that’s why I include it here. Stay tuned for the improved version.

Analytics and the Timeline

Stream has supported access to video analytics for a couple of years. The latest addition is the ability to superimpose details of viewer retention on a video as it is viewed by its owner. Previously this functionality was available as part of the analytics available in the flyout panel. As shown in Figure 4, as a video advances through its timeline, analytics shows the percentage of engaged viewers at any point.

Clearly the aim is to retain viewers until the end of a video but it’s natural to see some drop-off toward the end, which is why it’s important to communicate important messages early.

Preview Mode

Another new feature is the ability to preview a video so that the owner sees the content as others do when they view it. This option is available when playing a video. Previewing allows access to the transcript, analytics, and comments but not video settings. Oddly, the route back to owner mode is to click the Edit button.

It seems like preview mode is associated with the update described in message center notification MC698135 (December 14, 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 124992). The notification covers the difference between View mode and Edit mode and says that the default mode will be View to prevent inadvertent changes to video metadata happening when users with edit access open videos. At the time of writing, I see videos open in edit mode so the change hasn’t reached my tenant (deployment is due to be complete by the end of January 2024).

Hyperlinks and Forms in Videos

More changes are described in MC688631 (last updated December 14, 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 180795) where video owners can add a hyperlink or text callout to videos. The callouts are associated with specific points in the video timeline and appear when viewers reach those points. MC688632 (9 November 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 180796), describes much the same except that the timeline insertion covers surveys, quizzes, or polls created with Microsoft Forms.

Large Video Files and Automatic Transcript Generation

MC635989 (last updated 5 October 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 124932) promised that automatic generation of transcripts for videos uploaded to SharePoint Online, Viva Engage (Yammer), and Office.com would be complete for standard tenants by the end of December 2023.

That is, unless your videos are too large. I noticed that a video of a podcast I recorded with the CodeTwo Software team at the European SharePoint Conference didn’t have a transcript. When I tried to generate a transcript manually, Stream informed me that transcript generation only caters for videos with a maximum size of 4 GB. That’s a good limitation to know because many professional high-definition videos can generate very large files (11.8 GB in this case).

Odd Video Search

While working with videos in the Stream browser app, I noticed the availability of Visual Search option button when hovering over videos (Figure 5). I hadn’t seen this button before, but that could be the result of my inability to find options.

But I suspect it’s related to the announcement in MC681879 (16 October 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 117552) covering improvements in video search for Office.com and SharePoint. In any case, clicking the button causes Stream to perform a visual search. I’m not sure what criteria Stream uses for the search but it generated some odd results from YouTube (Figure 6). At least, results that I couldn’t correlate with the selected video.

Stream Evolving Fast

Because Stream is available in places like SharePoint and Teams it’s easy not to have a reason to go near the browser app for months at a time. The experience gained here revealed that because Stream is evolving fast it’s wise for tenant administrators to keep an eye on what’s happening, just in case you’re asked if a capability is available for video files. It’s just plain embarrassing when a feature exists and you aren’t aware of it.

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Clipchamp for Work, but Only for Microsoft 365 Commercial Customers

In a July 31 announcement, Microsoft says that they will make Clipchamp for Work available to Microsoft 365 commercial customers through the targeted release program in the coming weeks. The news is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 124826.

Although the advent of Clipchamp for Work is good news, it’s tempered by Microsoft’s statement that

“Clipchamp will be added to the following Microsoft 365 SKUs: Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft Business Premium. Clipchamp will not be added to Office 365 SKUs.”

Ignoring the Office 365 enterprise SKUs is part of Microsoft’s tactics to force customers to upgrade to Microsoft 365 SKUs to drive the average revenue per user (ARPU) and increase the profits flowing from its cloud business past the $111.6 billion mark announced for Microsoft’s 2023 fiscal year.

The same method is being used with Microsoft 365 for Copilot, which only supports the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 enterprise SKUs. Moving from Office 365 E3 to Microsoft 365 E3 costs an extra $13/user/month. Although a case can be argued that features like Windows 11 Enterprise and Enterprise Mobility and Security which are bundled into the Microsoft 365 enterprise SKUs represent good value for the extra cost, the fact remains that some customers don’t want to be forced to upgrade. Adding a very capable video editor to the Microsoft 365 enterprise SKUs probably won’t make any difference when it comes to deciding whether to upgrade, but it is one more factor to consider.

Adding on to Stream

Making Clipchamp for Work a new Microsoft 365 service plan makes sense. Like Stream for SharePoint, Clipchamp for Work stores its videos in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, so it’s very different to the Clipchamp consumer version. Microsoft won’t provide a migration mechanism to move videos from the consumer to commercial version.

Stream for SharePoint added features steadily since its release, recently adding inline playback in Teams, automatic transcript generation, and a teleprompter when recording videos. However, Stream for SharePoint lags behind Stream classic in terms of video editing capabilities. Stream classic never offered much, but at least it could trim some excess from the start and end of videos.

Clipchamp fills the void and adds a lot more functionality besides such as a gap remover (merge videos together seamlessly) and a video cropper. Microsoft also promises that “Filters, effects, and text overlays give your editing a professional and personalized look. With the green screen filter in Clipchamp, you can adjust your backgrounds to suit your professional context and environment. Transitions can easily be added as a finishing touch to give your video that high-quality look.”

Clipchamp for Work includes an in-browser video editor. You’ll be able to create a new video by launching Clipchamp from the Microsoft 365 app launcher or from OneDrive for Business. Clipchamp can edit videos stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, including Teams meeting recordings. The point about using SharePoint storage for videos is to take advantage of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite such as sharing, compliance, data lifecycle management (retention), and information protection.

Clipchamp Brings Proper Video Editing to Microsoft 365

When Microsoft bought Clipchamp in September 2021, the speculation was that Microsoft would add Clipchamp quickly to Office 365. Well, that hasn’t happened. Apart from needing to get used to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem so that single sign-on works and Clipchamp can process videos stored in SharePoint Online, the delay in reaching this point is likely due to waiting for Stream on SharePoint to mature and the migration from Stream classic to complete, which it now mostly is.

I’m glad to see a proper video editor in Microsoft 365. Video communications are becoming more important all the time. It’s just a pity that Microsoft won’t make the Clipchamp functionality available to their loyal Office 365 enterprise customers. We’ll just have to keep on using Camtasia instead.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Stream Video Playback Inline in Chats and Channel Conversations

Fresh from the artificial intelligence mysteries of the Maybelline beauty app and the prospect of losing content in teams with a thousand channels, Teams users can take advantage of the change announced in MC649917 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 127596). The change means that videos stored in Stream for SharePoint play inline within messages posted in a chat or channel conversation.

Enabling better Stream video playback within Teams might not sound very exciting, but it avoids the need for Stream to open a browser window and launch its client to play the content (Figure 1). Most people might even consider the capability to be better than boasting red lips in a meeting.

Microsoft is currently rolling out the update and expects all tenants to have it by late August.

Some Stream Issues with Teams

While checking out the new functionality, I ran into some problems with the links between Teams and Stream. First, the Stream app in Teams still connects to Stream classic. Given that the migration to Stream on SharePoint started last October, I’m surprised that app only accepts URLs for videos on the old platform. It would seem easy to detect if a tenant uses Steam on SharePoint and take appropriate action.

Second, the sharing options available in Stream includes the chance to share a video to a Teams chat or channel. The options works like the Share to Teams feature in Outlook in that it allows the user to select a target in Teams to share with. Unfortunately, Share to Teams in Stream couldn’t find many of the teams and chats that I use, including the test team I created to host 1,000 channels (Figure 2).

When Stream managed to share to a team channel, it created a simple link to the video  (Figure 3) that launches the Stream player when invoked. There’s no sign of enhanced Stream video playback here.

Obviously, the Stream team needs to do some more work to make the connection with Teams as seamless as it should be. I’ve reported both issues to Microsoft.

SharePoint Sorts Out its User Photos

Finally for the week, it’s interesting to read the message center notification MC653734 (July 21) covering “image coherence for SharePoint Online” (a truly horrible title). The update addresses user photo management for accounts that don’t have Exchange Online licenses or use Delve to update their photos to fix the problem where user photos displayed in SharePoint are different to those shown elsewhere in Microsoft 365 (hence “image coherence”).

In August 2023, Microsoft will roll out a fix to force SharePoint Online to display images fetched from the “Microsoft People System (MPS)”, just like all the other Microsoft 365 apps. In practical terms, this means that SharePoint will fetch the thumbnail photos stored in Entra ID accounts via the Graph profilePhoto API.

The impact on  users is that they will have to upload photos via Delve or using the avatar at the top right-hand corner of SharePoint pages (Figure 4). Admins can continue to update user photos via the Entra ID admin center or with PowerShell.

I don’t imagine that this change will affect many people. It removes a lingering piece of functionality that originated in SharePoint server and brings the app in line with the norms of the rest of Microsoft 365, and that’s good.

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Automated Stream Transcripts Restart in August 2023

The original version of Stream boasted the very useful ability to generate a transcript automatically as users uploaded videos. Microsoft stopped this process in September 2021 and began to remove transcripts for older videos. These steps were likely taken to simplify the migration to Stream on SharePoint, a process that’s been underway for about ten months at this point.

When Microsoft launched the new Stream client (video player) in mid-2022, it didn’t include automatic transcript generation. Since then, Microsoft added a bunch of useful features like a teleprompter facility, and now they’re bringing back automatic transcripts (message center notification MC635989, 11 July, 2023).

The support article for Stream transcripts lists support for 28 languages, and automatic transcript generation supports the same languages when it rolls out to standard release tenants starting in late July with worldwide deployment expected to finish by the end of August. Microsoft doesn’t give any dates for targeted release tenants to receive the update, so I assume that this is an enhancement that all tenants receive in one deployment cycle.

Microsoft 365 roadmap item 124932 covers the feature and notes that it is unavailable for test tenants and tenants with A1 licenses. Presumably this means that Stream won’t generate transcripts for videos uploaded by users with (Office 365) A1 licenses but will do so for videos uploaded by users in the same tenant with higher licenses, like Office 365 A3 or A5. I presume that users with A1 licenses can generate a transcript manually if they wish.

Stream Transcripts Generated for SharePoint Online, Viva Engage, and OneDrive for Business

Microsoft’s announcement says “Automatic Transcription for Video Uploads to SharePoint Online, Yammer, and Office.com.” Whoever wrote the message center post obviously didn’t read the memo about the rebranding of Yammer as Viva Engage in February 2023 and perhaps didn’t notice the recent update to apply the Viva Engage name and logo to the Yammer web client.

In any case, the plan is that Stream will automatically generate transcripts for videos uploaded to SharePoint Online, Viva Engage, and Office.com (which means your personal OneDrive for Business Account). Depending on meeting options, Teams meeting recordings might already have a transcript when uploaded to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.

Transcripts take time to generate so are not available immediately after uploading a video. The time required to generate a transcript depends on the length of the video, but it could take between 15 and 30 minutes before a transcript appears. If you get impatient or the transcript doesn’t show up, use the generate transcript command in video settings to force Stream to generate the file. Stream tells you how long remains as it processes the video to create the transcript.

The big advantages of having a transcript available for all videos is that users can:

• Search the transcript to find a specific point in a video. This is especially relevant for recordings of meetings or product briefings. Figure 1 shows a good example of using captions and the transcript to follow what happened during a briefing.
• Display captions for a video. A transcript is composed of time-encoded captions in WebVTT format, so once a transcript is available, captions are too.

In addition, transcripts make it easier for eDiscovery to locate videos because content searches can find words in a transcript.

Once the automatic transcript is available, the video owner can edit it to improve the accuracy of the text if necessary. Although transcription is usually pretty good, it’s unreasonable to expect it to be 100% given that people will mumble, use slang or words specific to their environment (like code names), or simply not enunciate well. A counterpoint is that statistics demonstrate that very few video recordings of events are ever rewatched and probably fewer people consult transcripts, so editing and updating transcript text is probably something that’s not a high-value activity in many cases.

Controlling Generation of Stream Transcripts

Stream enables automatic transcription by default. If you want to disable the feature, you must:

• Use PowerShell to connect to SharePoint Online administration.

Run the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet to update the MediaTranscriptionAutomaticFeatures setting to disabled:

Set-SPOTenant -MediaTranscriptionAutomaticFeatures Disabled

Like any tenant-wide setting, it can take a few hours before the new setting is effective everywhere.

Stream Transcripts Everywhere

It’s good that Stream is bringing automatic transcription back for new videos. The message center post doesn’t say anything about existing videos. If you want transcripts for those videos, you’ll have to create them yourself.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Making Stream Recordings Even Better

On May 2, Microsoft issued an update about plans to enhance video in Microsoft 365, mostly concentrated on Stream, including “video-first SharePoint pages.” Intriguing as this prospect is, my attention was taken by some new features to improve the recording capabilities of the Stream web app like a Stream teleprompter. I last covered Stream recording capabilities in September 2022 and was impressed at the ease of recording. Stream is not the tool for making the next great film classic, but it’s more than capable of making videos covering topics like product announcements and internal news, albeit limited to 15 minutes length.

The Stream Teleprompter

While we might all think that we will deliver perfectly formed words in a recording, there’s no doubt that very few can speak off-the-cuff in a way that makes sense. Enter the Stream teleprompter, a panel that scrolls through some previously entered text as you speak (Figure 1). Text can be inserted directly or (more likely) copied from another source. I find it best to prepare text in a Word document before pasting the text from Word into Stream.

The idea is that seeing the words in front of you makes it easier to speak confidently and not forget anything important. Whether it reduces the number of retakes depends on the speaker.

The teleprompter comes with a scroll speed control (beside the X in the menu bar). The default speed is a reasonable pace for talking, and you can slow down or increase the scroll speed to match your delivery. Naturally, the teleprompter doesn’t appear in the video that viewers see (Figure 2).

Video Background

As noted in my previous article, for a video background, Stream supports the use of the standard Teams background images, background blur, and a custom image. Unfortunately, you still can’t save a custom image for reuse. What’s new is that you can project your workstation screen (window or browser tab) as the video background, a feature that I’m sure will be popular with those who produce teaching videos.

Figure 3 shows the idea. I wrote a PowerShell script to extract and report Planner data for Microsoft 365 groups using the Planner Graph API. The video explains how to use PowerShell to work with plans, tasks, and buckets with the PowerShell console as the background. Another Stream recording feature places some text on-screen to point the viewer to a follow-up article. Regretfully, hyperlinks are unsupported, and formatting of the text is less flexible than it could be (setting font size is not available). But overall, Stream delivers easy-to-use recording functionality that’s improving over time.

Other Stream Updates

In the same blog post, Microsoft said that they plan to add automatic transcript generation for videos later this year. Today, Stream only processes automatic transcripts when Teams meeting organizers enable transcription for recordings. Stream generates transcripts for other videos if a video owner requests this through the transcript and options section of the Stream web app. Transcripts are now downloadable in Word (docx) format, which is a nice change because it’s a lot easier to edit Word to fix any hiccups in the transcript due to the AI not fully understanding what people say.

A change coming in June 2023 is that Stream will insert the profile picture of people in video transcripts to replace the initials of people who speak that now appear alongside their contributions. If the Azure AD accounts for tenant members and guests don’t have thumbnail photos, Stream will revert to initials. Time to check Azure AD to make sure that photos are available for user accounts and guest accounts.

Finally, Microsoft says the Stream web app now has a moveable captions box. This avoids the problem that occurs when captions appear over critical parts of the video. If this happens, click on the captions box and drag it to wherever you want the captions to appear (or repositioned, to use the formal term).

Maturing Stream

I really like the teleprompter feature in Stream web app. It’s a simple idea that makes lots of sense, just like making captions moveable. Both are evidence of the increasing maturity of the new Stream. Now if all of those pesky migrations from Stream classic could just finish…

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Time to Move to Stream for SharePoint

The formal date for general availability for Stream on SharePoint was October 12, 2022.. According to Microsoft 365 notification MC496849 (12 Jan 2023), Microsoft will retire the original (classic) version of the Stream video app on February 15, 2024. After making the migration tool to move videos to Stream for SharePoint available last October and continuing to roll out features to make Stream on SharePoint functionally equivalent, Microsoft considers that it’s appropriate to start the shutdown clock.

Users won’t be able to upload new content to Stream classic after May 15, 2023, and will lose access to the Stream classic app after October 15, 2023. Microsoft plans to release an update to allow organizations to adjust these dates through the Stream admin center sometime in February. However, nothing will stop the final shutdown happening in February 2024. At that point, Microsoft will block access to Stream classic for everyone and remove any video content that tenants fail to migrate. For more information about Stream migration and the retirement timeline, see this article.

Interestingly, Stream users in all tenants will see a button to allow them to upload videos to Stream on SharePoint from January 18, 2023. This is a small hint to end users that Stream for SharePoint is the future.

Stream Live Events

Stream live events are an exception to the retirement strategy. I’m unsure if this aspect of Streams classic ever got much traction but no doubt some tenants use the functionality. Microsoft is pointing people to Teams live events with external encoder support as the replacement. Microsoft says that they will announce a retirement date for Stream live events sometime in the first quarter of 2023 and allow tenants six months to prepare before terminating the service.

Stream on SharePoint More of a Service than an App

As I have noted before, Stream on SharePoint is fundamentally different to Stream classic. The original Stream followed the template laid down by the Office 365 Video app. Stream classic created the same kind of portal powered by Azure media services and Azure blob storage. Apart from the obvious storage relocation, Stream on SharePoint is much more about delivering video services throughout Microsoft 365 than being a standalone video management app. Deep connections with SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Viva Connections, Yammer, and Teams mark the new Stream approach to making its services for video capture, storage, and replay available throughout Microsoft 365. The new Stream video player (Figure 1) is an example – it’s called to play videos throughout Microsoft 365.

Video is a steadily increasing presence within Microsoft 365. Recent examples include the introduction of video messages (1 minute maximum) in Teams chat and video stories (3 minutes maximum) in the Yammer storyline. Yammer stores its video in user OneDrive for Business accounts, but Teams video chats are not captured in SharePoint (yet). Eventually, I anticipate that all video content created by Microsoft 365 users will be in SharePoint storage. It just makes sense.

Where’s Clipchamp?

The position of Clipchamp in Microsoft 365 is still not as obvious as people perhaps expected it to be following Microsoft’s acquisition of the company in September 2021. Stream includes basic video recording and effects functionality without the sophisticated editing capabilities available in Clipchamp, which proclaims itself to be “the new video editor from Microsoft 365” (personal). However, there’s still no sign of a Clipchamp service plan in any of the Office 365 SKUs.

On to Stream 2.0

Migrations can be painful projects. In the case of Stream classic, the migration tools do a fair job and the overall process appears to be working well. Some might complain about minor losses in functionality (like videos no longer being owned by Microsoft 365 groups), but overall this migration is not difficult. Video is becoming pervasive across Microsoft 365. All we need now is a nice video editor to make everyone as good as they can possibly look.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Move Videos from Azure Storage to SharePoint

Publicized in message center post MC437552 (September 23), the Stream migration tool to move videos from the classic Azure-based storage to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business became available in public preview in early October. Microsoft says that they expect the migration tool to be generally available in early 2023.

 Microsoft says that the migration tool will “transfer audio and video files to Stream (on SharePoint) while also bringing over all critical metadata and permissions associated with your Stream (Classic) content. Additionally, the tool will ensure that links and embeds of Stream (Classic) content will be redirected to the same content on Stream (on SharePoint).”

Originally launched in June 2017, Stream Classic took over from the original Office 365 Video portal in early 2020. That lengthy transition testified to the difficulties involved in moving content from one repository to another. The Stream transition to SharePoint Online is quite a strategic move for Microsoft as it further consolidates Microsoft 365 application content within SharePoint Online (and OneDrive for Business). Using a common repository for multiple data types makes it easier to engineer and maintain services like search. Microsoft says that they expect to announce a retirement date for Stream classic in early 2023 and plans to keep the service available for a year afterward.

The Migration Tool

Microsoft uses the Migration Manager tool to migrate videos from Stream classic. The tool is available in the SharePoint Online admin center (Figure 1). It’s the same technology Microsoft uses to move other data sources into SharePoint. Levering a proven migration framework rather than building a bespoke tool is an intelligent approach.

The Migration Process

I don’t intend to go through Microsoft’s step-by-step documentation for the Stream migration process. Instead, I’ll highlight the major phases and note my experience of running a migration. The migration process is divided into three stages:

• Scan: Look for Stream classic videos stored in Azure storage. The videos are categorized as Stream group (a channel), a Microsoft 365 group, or user content. The scan automatically populates the known locations in Stream classic. You can decide to migrate some or all of the locations (Figure 2).
• Prepare migration: After all the Stream classic videos are found, they can be added as migration targets in either SharePoint Online sites or OneDrive for Business accounts. User content videos move to OneDrive while group content moves to SharePoint.
• Migrate: This stage processes the videos by moving them from the Stream classic repository to the nominated targets. During this process, any links and embeds pointing to the old classic locations are redirected to the new locations.

Background jobs perform the scanning to find video files. The time required depends on the load on the service and the number of videos in the various locations. Suffice to say that it can take some time before the scan results are available. Apart from reviewing the results on screen (Figure 3), you can download reports to analyze the information and decide what content to include in the migration.

Adjusting Settings Before Moving Content

One of the big advantages of moving Stream storage to SharePoint is that users can take advantage of larger storage quotas. However, this isn’t a good reason to migrate everything as there’s no doubt that some older video content can probably be left to rot in Stream classic until the service closes down. This is especially true for Teams meeting recordings. When Microsoft introduced automatic expiration for Teams meeting recordings, they noted that 99% of all recordings are not watched again 110 days after the meeting. Applying this rule to old videos of Teams meetings waiting to be migrated seems like a good idea.

Before migration, you can adjust the target location if necessary (Figure 4). For instance, you might decide to bring the videos belonging to multiple Microsoft 365 groups together in a single SharePoint Online site.

Migrating

After making whatever adjustments are required, you can migrate the content. Be sure that you’re ready because there’s no way to reverse course once the migration process moves videos from Stream classic to SharePoint.

Once again, this is a background process that will proceed at its own pace. I launched the job overnight and came back in the morning to find that everything had gone well with only one hiccup (Figure 5).

The hiccup seemed to be a glitch in the migration process. Selecting the line displays a flyout pane with details of the migration. This reported that the migration couldn’t download one video owned by a Microsoft 365 group. However, when I looked at the group through the classic Stream portal, no videos were present and a set of videos were in the destination SharePoint Online site. This is a preview and it is notoriously difficult for migration tools to process 100% of content right exactly right. Even with the glitch, the right outcome occurred as the process moved videos from Stream classic to SharePoint Online.

It’s important to realize that once the migration tool moves videos from Stream classic, it soft-deletes the files to hide them from the Stream classic portal. The soft-deleted files do not appear in the Stream recycle bin. Microsoft will remove the files permanently “180 days after admin disables the tenant but not before classic end of life,” implying that there might be some way to restore videos if necessary.

Don’t Forget the Pre- and Post-Migration Work

Migrating from Stream classic to Stream for SharePoint isn’t just a matter of moving video files. Up-front planning is needed to determine what the target locations should be. Just because a Microsoft 365 group owned some videos in Stream classic doesn’t mean that its SharePoint Online site is the right target location.

Critical metadata moves to SharePoint Online (title, description, thumbnails, transcripts, and permission), but the metadata for some videos might need updating after the transition. Equally, the need might exist to adjust other video settings (like add chapters or set an expiration date) or to edit a transcript. But if you just want to move videos across, the Stream migration tool does a good job.

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Another Functionality Gap Plugged

Microsoft 365 notification MC400977 (updated August 31) covers the introduction of the Recording video feature in the Stream for SharePoint browser client (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 88522). This is part of the work to replace the old Stream classic browser interface by introducing a new Stream portal. In this instance, the upgrade allows users to create 15-minute videos by recording themselves or their screen.

Users in targeted release tenants should now have this functionality. General availability roll-out is ongoing and should be complete by the end of October.

In passing, it’s worth noting that the beta version of the Stream 2.0 for iOS and Android apps (Figure 1) are available for testing. This version allows users to play videos stored in Stream Classic and Stream for SharePoint. Although, the app doesn’t yet support recording, it’s good to see the ecosystem building out.

Recording a Stream Video

Getting back to the Stream for SharePoint browser client, Microsoft says “Users will now be able to use the new Stream camera to record their webcam, record their screen, add edits (think ink, text, backgrounds, and filters) and upload to their OneDrive. Future iterations of the camera will include more features, such as adding music clips.”

Update: the Stream browser app now offers two options for recording: camera and screen.

In other words, Stream can use the technologies built into a workstation to record video (webcam) and screen, and then do some basic editing (some applied before recording starts), before storing everything in OneDrive for Business.

To begin, select the big New recording button in the Stream client. This launches a new browser tab ready to record video. Like Teams, Stream supports background effects (referred to as a backdrop), and offers the set of default background images available in Teams along with background blur and the ability to upload an image. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to save a custom background the way you can with Teams, nor does Stream offer the chance to use any custom background images you’ve already uploaded for Teams. As shown in Figure 2, the same green-screen technique is used to place the user in front of the background image. Interestingly, grab handles are available for the user image to allow the user to drag and place their image anywhere on the recording canvas. They can also resize their image to make it larger or smaller as appropriate to the content being recorded.

You can have great fun playing with the effects built into the Stream camera. Anyone who’s accustomed to working with video apps on mobile phones or other platforms will find nothing challenging here. In my case, I limited myself to moving my picture to the bottom right of the backdrop and inserting some text (Figure 3).

When everything’s ready, click the big round record button. Stream starts a three-second countdown (to settle your nerves) and then starts to record. When you’re finished (or come to the end of the 15 minute maximum supported for recordings), hit the stop button. You now have an opportunity to review what Stream captured (Figure 4). If you’re happy to keep the content, click Publish.

If you have an app like OBS VirtualCam or Snap camera that appears as a valid device camera, you can use these devices instead of a standard webcam.

Recording Files

When it publishes a video, Stream writes it into the top-level of the user’s OneDrive for Business account. It would be nice if Stream allowed you to defined a folder to store these recordings. The files are named after the date and time of the recording, so you end up with files like 20220913_203811 (recorded on 13 September, 2022 at 20:38:11). Files have a .wbem extension, indicating that the files are saved in the WebM format.

Updating Recordings

Once stored in OneDrive for Business, you can update the properties of recordings to generate a transcript and captions, add some text to describe what the video is about, and allow or disable comments (Figure 5), or share the recording with other people.

One thing I do is rename the file to give the recording a title that’s more appropriate to its content. Renaming has a consequence. The Stream client caches information about videos and will continue to display the old file name for a while after the rename happens. Any attempt to access the video at this point will fail because Stream tries to open the file with the old name. However, after a few minutes (or a browser refresh), the cache should catch up with actuality and display the new name.

Relationship with Clipchamp

Microsoft acquired Clipchamp in late 2021. Since then we’ve been waiting to see how Microsoft will make Clipchamp available to Microsoft 365 commercial customers (it’s already included in the Microsoft 365 family and personal plans). It seems reasonable to assume that Microsoft will include Clipchamp Essentials in Office 365 SKUs at some point in the future to allow users to edit the videos they record with Stream (the trim feature available in Stream classic is unavailable for the new Stream) or import from other sources, or indeed stitch segments captured in individual files together to create a longer video.

Stream Continuing to Evolve

Microsoft is making steady progress on the transition to Stream on SharePoint. The new web player is 100% deployed to Office 365 commercial tenants (not yet GCC) to play videos stored in Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. Being able to record videos is another important part of the puzzle and it’s nice to see that it’s available now.

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Useful Spreadsheet to Understand Changes

Two weeks ago, I reviewed the new Stream (on SharePoint) client. The client is incomplete, and Microsoft still has lots of work to do to round it out. An online spreadsheet helps customers compare the functionality available in the new Stream client against the classic client, and it’s worthwhile checking out to make sure that your favorite feature is in Microsoft’s plans.

Before reviewing what Microsoft intends to do as it builds out Stream on SharePoint, it’s worthwhile considering the fundamental nature of the change that’s in motion. Microsoft designed Stream classic as a standalone app. The original idea was that Stream could function independently of Office 365 to allow Microsoft to sell it to customers who didn’t have a tenant or allow consumers to use Stream to store video analogous to the way Outlook.com and OneDrive consumer work. Inside Office 365, Stream would replace the old Office 365 Video portal.

Stream Services Rather than a Portal

The app idea is dead. Stream on SharePoint is really a set of services that manage video files stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The obvious manifestation of the services is revealed in the web audio and video player, while the new Stream client is really just an adaptation of the OneDrive client modified to manage video files.

The transition means that there is no video portal. People interact with videos they have access to through the new Stream client, but there’s no organization-wide portal to highlight selected videos or publish material to end users. If organizations want this kind of functionality, they need to use a different approach. For example:

• A SharePoint site tailored to highlight and feature selected videos.
• A channel in a team dedicated to the same purpose.
• Organization videos published through Viva Learning.
• Videos published through a Yammer community.

In other words, there’s more work to do to create an organization-wide video portal. On the plus side, you now have the option to select your preferred approach instead of being limited to a video portal conceived and delivered by Microsoft.

Video Organization

Another related change is in how Stream organizes videos. Stream classic can collect videos into channels and Microsoft 365 groups. These concepts don’t exist in the new Stream because SharePoint organizes its files into sites, libraries, and folders. However, something called SharePoint video collections page is coming soon that appears to take the place of channels. The notion of using Microsoft 365 Groups to organize videos is present because many SharePoint sites are backed by a Microsoft 365 group, but it’s a less direct connection than what happens in Stream classic.

Stream Audit Events

On the compliant front, the Stream-specific audit events logged when users uploaded and viewed videos are no more. Microsoft says that “Audit log schema will change and be logged against the file in ODB or SPO.”

In other words, audit capture for video uploads and other activity is treated in the same way as other SharePoint file operations. When someone uploads a video, SharePoint captures a FileUploaded event; when they modify a video, SharePoint captures a FileModified event. Some Stream-specific events remain, such as those for transcript generation (FileTranscriptCreated), but the majority of the logged events for Stream actions are likely to look like SharePoint file operations.

There’s no harm in using SharePoint file operations audit events until the time comes to extract Stream events from the audit log. You’ll now need to search for the standard SharePoint file operations and then extract the Stream events from that set, probably based on file type (here’s an example PowerShell script I wrote to report Teams meeting recordings).

The problem here is the sheer volume of SharePoint file operations, especially FileModified events. Office documents stored in SharePoint and OneDrive generate vast quantities of these events because of the way the AutoSave feature works, so 5,000 FileModified audit events might only include two or three relevant to Stream. Some won’t care about this change at all, but you will if you use audit events to track video uploads.

Lots of change is in the air. It will be interesting how Microsoft 365 tenants take to the new Stream.

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But Only for New Content

Earlier this week, I wrote about updating the Stream tile in the Microsoft 365 app launcher to point to the preview version of the new Steam client (aka Steam on SharePoint) instead of Steam classic. Since then, I’ve been exercising the new client to understand its strengths and weaknesses. In fact, the new Stream client is a composite of the browser interface to manage videos and the web player to play videos and control their settings. If you play a video from the OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online clients, those clients launch the same player.

The first question I received after the original post was, “can I access my old videos in the new client?” Alas, the answer is no. At least, not until Microsoft delivers the migration capability to move videos out of the old Azure blob storage to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online (ODSP). For now, the only videos you can access through the new client are:

• Teams meeting recordings (both your recordings and ones shared with you).
• Videos that you upload to the new client (or OneDrive for Business). This includes video files uploaded through applications like Yammer and Teams.
• Videos shared with you.
• Videos attached to emails in your Exchange Online mailbox. I don’t know if Microsoft Search is clever enough to find videos in Exchange on-premises hybrid mailboxes.

There are not many user settings to tweak for the new Stream client. You can change to dark mode, and that’s about all.

Using Graph Insights

The first thing I found is that the new Stream client is smarter than the old one. Take the set of videos highlighted at the top of the video list. The far-left video is tagged “this may relate to a recent meeting.”

I’d used another new feature – Add to a calendar item – to include a link to a video in a meeting invitation. Stream calls the OWA create meeting screen (Figure 2) to set up the meeting, complete with an embedded link to the video and the ability to adjust sharing to accommodate all the meeting participants. Because I sent the invitation, Stream figured that I maybe should review the video myself before the call. It’s a nice use of the Graph Meeting Insights API.

The Add to options for videos also includes To Do. It’s not a very exciting option because it creates a very bare-bones personal task in To Do. I assume the purpose is that the task will remind you to do something with the video, but if you want a full reminder of what you need to do, you’ll need to open the task and add a note to yourself. And who remembers to do that…

Share to Teams

Seeing that the new Stream client is essentially OneDrive for Video, sharing is a strength. The old client was very inward-focused, but the new client allows users to share videos with anyone they can send an email to. You can also share to Teams, using the same functionality that’s available in Outlook, to post a message containing a video link to a person, group, or channel.

Transcripts

For a long time, Stream classic generated transcripts for uploaded videos (it also had a people view where you could find places where someone appeared in a video). In August 2021, Microsoft decided to reduce the amount of data involved in the Stream 2.0 migration by removing some transcripts. The new Stream doesn’t generate a transcript when it uploads videos. Instead, if the spoken language in the video is English, Steam can generate an automatic transcript. Otherwise, you’ll need to create your own transcript.

A transcript is a collection of time-coded text snippets (the same text is used for closed captions) in the VTT format. Figure 3 shows a video playing with both the transcript and captions on display.

You can download the automatically-generated transcript file and amend it with a text editor (or even better, a VTT editor – here’s a free online version). This allows you to correct phrases or even add speaker attribution to indicate who’s speaking. When you’re ready, you delete the existing transcript and upload your version for Stream to use.

Updating Video Details

Different capabilities (to the classic client) are available to amend or interact with videos. For instance, there’s no way to trim a video (remove some content from the start and end of a video). This might well come in time, or perhaps Microsoft will deploy their Clipchamp acquisition for this purpose.

The options available in video settings are:

• Choose your preferred thumbnail image for a video. You can move a slider through the video to find the frame you want and use that.
• Publish details of a video. The editor is basic but good enough, and it’s more than sufficient to compose the text to give users information about the content (Figure 4). Regretfully, the filtering capability in the Stream client doesn’t use the descriptive text entered for videos, but the search (SharePoint search) does. The video owner can decide to turn the description on or off.
• Ability to turn on comments for the video. The commenting engine is the same used for Office documents. The owner can allow or disable comments for a video, and they can also delete all existing comments for a video.
• Ability to break large videos up into smaller chunks with chapter marks. Think of a chapter as a scene within a larger play. The chapter marks on the video timeline allows a user to navigate to the point they’re interested in.
• Turn noise suppression on by default (a good thing if a video has a lot of background noise).

Missing Pieces

I’ve already mentioned video trimming as a useful capability that’s not currently available in the new Stream client. Among the other missing features I’ve noticed are:

• Replace a video.
• Screen capture.
• Organize videos into channels with Microsoft 365 groups.
• Highlighting selected corporate videos managed at the organization level.

There’s bound to be other features that I haven’t picked up yet, and some older features are redundant in the world of ODSP. For instance, the new Stream client uses the standard recycle bin and doesn’t need its own recovery mechanism.

Finally, the Stream mobile apps currently only access classic Stream files. So maybe that’s the trick until Microsoft completes the migration. Use the browser interface to work with new video content and revert to the mobile client to get to old files. It couldn’t be simpler!

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Update the App Tile to Point to the New Stream

Message center notification MC381948 appeared on May 18, but I confess to not having paid much attention to it due to other more important topics. In any case, the notification informs tenants that they can configure the target for the Stream tile in the Office 365 app launcher to direct users to Stream powered by SharePoint rather than the classic Stream. Targeted release tenants should have the update now, with standard release tenants getting it in early July. By late August, all tenants should be able to update the app tile.

Classic Stream stores its video files in Azure blob storage. The plan of record is to move everything to SharePoint-based storage. Personal videos will be in OneDrive for Business while shared (group videos) will be in the document libraries of the SharePoint Online team sites belonging to Microsoft 365 groups (teams). Progression is already obvious as all newly-created Teams meeting recordings are now in the new location. Using SharePoint-based storage means that many features become available for videos, like the application of expiry dates for meeting recordings. In addition, OneDrive for Business offers a lot more storage quota for videos.

Migration a Work in Progress

The big piece of work remaining for Microsoft to do is the migration of old video content from classic Stream. The latest information is that Microsoft has the migration tool in private preview with some customers. Dates for when the migration tool will become generally available are unavailable.

Diverting the App Tile to the New Stream

In the interim, tenants might find it useful to divert users away from the old Stream and have them upload any new video content into OneDrive for Business. And that’s where MC381948 comes in. A new setting is available in the SharePoint admin center to control the behavior of the app tile for Stream. Three values are available

• The default option is to Automatically switch to Stream (on SharePoint). Microsoft controls this option and will set it after the migration of existing Stream content is complete.
• Stream (on SharePoint) directs users to the preview GUI for the new Stream. The user can switch to the classic Stream GUI if they want.
• Stream (Classic) forces people to use the classic Stream GUI.

In Figure 1, I chose to switch to the new Stream. After saving the choice, it takes about ten minutes for the option to ripple across the tenant (and maybe a browser refresh, just in case).

In effect, the target URI for the app tile changes from https://web.microsoftstream.com/ to https://www.office.com/launch/stream. The new GUI (Figure 2) displays any video files found in the user’s OneDrive for Business plus any video attachments for Outlook messages. This ability to highlight video attachments leverages the new messages search vertical and highlights the role of the new Stream in managing video content stored anywhere in Microsoft 365 instead of just in a dedicated repository.

Feel the Power of an Updated App Tile

There’s not much more to say about the new option (nor any nuggets to glean from the Microsoft documentation). On the one hand, it makes sense to begin using the new video storage and management platform for new content. On the other hand, you can argue that it’s best to keep all video content in one place until the migration is ready. The fatal flaw in that argument is the storage of Teams meeting recordings in OneDrive for Business. I switched to embrace change. What will you do with your app tile?

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Stream Manages Videos Stored in ODSP

Message Center notification MC317765 (updated March 17) announces that Microsoft Stream videos stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business now have a comments button. The new feature is rolling out now (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 88521) and is part of the Stream 2.0 initiative to transition Stream from Azure-based storage to OneDrive and SharePoint (ODSP). Stream now stores all new Teams meeting recordings in ODSP. Playback and management of the videos are through Stream, which is why this feature is categorized under Stream.

Threaded Comments

The comments button is available in the Stream player. When playing an audio or video file, look in the set of options overlaid on the upper right-hand side of the screen during playback, and you’ll see the button included in the set available to manage interaction with the file. Other options in the set include ones to update video settings and access the transcript (if one is available). The button exposes a panel where people can interact through threaded conversations to discuss the content of the video (Figure 1). Video owners can edit their comments and delete comments from other users (using the ellipsis menu).

Microsoft says that the backend for the feature is the same used for comments about files stored in ODSP, presenting the comments with “a new Office look and feel within the player.” In other words, Stream files now have the same commenting ability as other Office documents stored in ODSP., something that’s aligned with Microsoft’s goal to make video and audio content as easy to work with as Office documents.

More importantly, users with view-only permissions (to play the video) don’t need edit permission for files to create comments. Microsoft notes that this is “a change in behavior in terms of permissions for video and audio files.” Users who attend a Teams meeting receive view-only permission to view the video stored in ODSP afterward.

Per-Video for Comments

Not all Microsoft Stream videos are an appropriate forum for comments. For instance, you might not want people commenting about a video explaining a sensitive company policy. If so, anyone with edit access to a video can update its settings to disable comments (Figure 2).

Tenant-Wide Controls

Apart from per-video control, tenant-wide settings are available through PowerShell to control posting of comments to Microsoft Stream videos. To update the settings, run the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet from the SharePoint Online management module. Until now, SharePoint supported the CommentsOnFilesDisabled parameter to control if comments are available for all files stored in ODSP. The latest version of the module includes support for the ViewersCanCommentOnMediaDisabled parameter to control comments for video and audio files. Details for these parameters are:

• CommentsOnFilesDisabled: The default is False, if set to True, it disables comments. for all files stored in OSDP (documents and videos).
• ViewersCanCommentOnMediaDisabled: The default is False. If set to True, it disables the ability of users to add comments to video and audio files unless they have edit permission for a file.

To update the settings, run Set-SPOTenant. This command disables the ability of users with view-only permission to post comments:

Set-SPOTenant -ViewersCanCommentOnMediaDisabled $True

The Compliance Aspect

One issue I ran into is that I could not find comments posted for videos with a content search. Content searches can find comments in Office documents stored in ODSP, so the inability to locate comments posted for audio and video files might be due to a timing issue where Microsoft hasn’t yet deployed all the bits needed to support indexing to my tenant. In any case, it’s something I shall keep an eye on.

Comments Everywhere

Given that people are accustomed to commenting on videos posted to platforms like YouTube and Facebook, it makes sense to support comments for Microsoft Stream videos. The interface should be natural to anyone who posts comments in Office documents, once they find the Comments button.

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Know Who’s Collaborating in Teams Shared Channels From Outside Your Tenant

Updated 4 March 2024

When Microsoft launched Teams shared channels into public preview (according to MC390413, shared channels will GA in mid-July 2022) the rubber hit the road as tenant administrators tried to figure out the complexities of managing shared channels in production use. It’s true that Microsoft conducted a long private preview with many customers to get shared channels to the point where they squashed obvious bugs and delivered usable software. However, once software is exposed to the kind of examination that an application with 270 million monthly active users can create, other questions bubble to the surface.

Which brings me to the topic of controlling user access to shared channels. The cross-tenant access settings in the External identities section of the Entra admin center control which tenants your organization can access using Entra ID B2B Direct Connect. This is the underlying authentication mechanism for Teams shared channels. It allows users to authenticate in their home tenant and use that authentication, including MFA and device state claims, to access resources in other tenants, if permitted by other tenants.

Entra ID Sign-Ins Track Cross-Tenant Access

Microsoft’s guidance for cross-tenant access settings advises that you can use Entra ID sign in logs to figure out user access to other tenants. It’s true that you can use the PowerShell snippet provided there, but I think we can do better.

The code uses the Get-MgBetaAuditLogSignIn cmdlet from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to look for sign in records where the resource tenant identifier (the organization delivering a resource like Teams) is not the same as the home tenant identifier (the organization hosting the sign in logs).

$TenantId = (Get-MgOrganization).Id
Get-MgBetaAuditLogSignIn -Filter "ResourceTenantId ne '$TenantId'" -All:$True

The code works (the All switch doesn’t need $True), but the result of the query is a set of sign-in records for both Entra ID B2B Collaboration (guest accounts) and Entra ID B2B Direct Connect. This is a better filter if you want to focus on access to Teams shared channels:

Get-MgBetaAuditLogSignIn -Filter "ResourceTenantId ne '$TenantId' and CrossTenantAccessType eq 'b2bDirectConnect'" -All

Next, although you might recognize the identifier for your tenant, it’s unlikely that you’ll know the identifiers for other tenants (like 22e90715-3da6-4a78-9ec6-b3282389492b). To translate these identifiers into human-friendly tenant names, we need another method.

We’re already connected to the Microsoft Graph, so we can use a Graph query to resolve the identifier into a tenant name.

Finding Tenant Names

Fortunately, a beta query called findTenantInformationByTenantId does the trick. There’s little documentation available, but by running it through the Invoke-MgGraphRequest cmdlet (runs any Graph query when an SDK cmdlet is unavailable), we can retrieve tenant data:

$ExternalTenantId = $Record.ResourceTenantId
$Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/tenantRelationships/findTenantInformationByTenantId(tenantId='$ExternalTenantId')"
$ExternalTenantData = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri $Uri -Method Get

The tenant information returned is:

Name                           Value
----                           -----
@odata.context                 https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#microsoft.graph.tenantInformation
tenantId                       22e90715-3da6-4a78-9ec6-b3282389492b
displayName                    o365maestros
federationBrandName
defaultDomainName              o365maestros.onmicrosoft.com

I assume this web site, which can return the identifier of any Microsoft 365 tenant, uses a similar API.

Flow of the Script

The flow of the PowerShell script to analyze sign-in data is therefore:

• Find sign-in records for Entra ID Direct Connect activity. If you want to process records for Azure B2B Collaboration, change the filter to remove the check against the CrossTenantAccessType property.
• Extract data from each record, including resolving external tenant identifiers to tenant names.
• Report.

In normal circumstances, the sign-in data will feature just a few tenants. It would be slow to run a query to resolve the tenant identifier for every record. To ensure performance, the script resolves a tenant name the first time it is encountered and stores the tenant name identifier and name in a hash table. When the script processes subsequent records for the same tenant, it reads the information from the hash table.

You can download the script from GitHub. Normal warnings apply: use at your peril, etc. and please fix my bugs…

Script Outputs

The output of the script is a PowerShell list containing details of sign-ins which use cross-tenant access to connect to Teams shared channels in external tenants (Figure 1).

The data can be parsed to reveal statistics like which tenants use cross-tenant access:

$Report | Group TenantName | Sort Count -Descending | Format-Table Name, Count

Or to reveal the names of the users who connect to external tenants:

$Report | Group User | Sort Count -Descending | Format-Table Name, Count

Name       Count
----       -----
Sean Landy     4
James Ryan     3
Ken Bowers     3

And so on. I’m sure you’ll find other ways to use the information to track what’s happening with Teams shared channels. The point is that the data is there if you need it. All that’s required is a little massaging of the information.

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Now Available in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Message Center Notification MC302489 (December 8) brings news of yet another tweak made by Microsoft to the dialog used to create new Sharing Links. The update means that the settings for sharing links for “most video and audio” files now block download by default (Figure 1).

Previous tweaks to the dialog include making it easier to update sharing link settings and highlighting the edit setting. Because many workloads use the sharing link dialog, the benefit of the changes ripple across Microsoft 365.

Understandable Change in Line with Previous Updates

The change is understandable. Sharing a video or audio is often just an invitation to consume final content (using the recently-upgraded web viewer) and you don’t want people to be able to download the files. By comparison, sharing a document, spreadsheet, or presentation is often for review and editing purposes, and the recipient might need to download a local copy to edit the file offline.

Interestingly, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 82193 makes explicit reference to Microsoft Stream, probably reflecting the ongoing motion to move Stream away from its old Azure-based platform to storing videos in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. This transition has already happened for Teams meeting recordings, and the migration for other Stream content is in preview. Teams meeting recordings restrict download access to the recording owner, so setting sharing links to no download by default is in line with that philosophy.

Not All Video or Audio Files

Noting the caveat that the change applies to most video and audio files, I checked the content of my OneDrive for Business account and discovered that OneDrive blocks downloads in sharing links created for Teams meeting recordings. The same doesn’t happen for other MP4 files that I uploaded to OneDrive where the download control is missing when creating sharing links (Figure 2).

The BlockDownloadLinksFileType setting for my tenant (managed through PowerShell with the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet) is WebPreviewableFiles, which means that download blocks are available for all supported files. Given that audio and video files are now in the supported category, something else is going on.

OneDrive recognizes both sets of files as MP4s, so the difference in behavior might be because the uploaded files didn’t have the same PROGID tags as the Teams recordings (these tags make it possible to apply an auto-label retention policy to Teams meeting recordings). Alternatively, it could be because some background job hasn’t yet processed the other MP4 files. Requiring extended periods to process files is not unknown in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In any case, I’ll keep an eye to see if things change.

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Cleanout Starts on September 20

As we all know, Stream is in the middle of a migration from its old platform based on Azure storage to ODSP (OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online). All new Teams meeting recordings are now stored in ODSP and Microsoft is preparing for the next phase, which is to migrate videos stored in Stream classic to ODSP. A bunch of work is going on to prepare the way, like a new web player for video content (MC261352, last updated August 10, due for a complete deployment by the end of September) and a new way of viewing the transcript of Teams meeting recordings (MC274185, July 30). In other words, things seem to be progressing nicely on the Stream 2.0 front.

Clearing Out Old Video Transcripts

That is until you read MC279467 (published August 20. At first glance, the text seems inconsistent with the generally positive progress of Stream. The notification says that starting September 20, Stream users will be unable to access (view, search, or edit) the transcripts automatically generated by Stream for:

• New videos uploaded to Stream. However, transcripts will be generated once the newly uploaded video receives one view.
• Older videos which have not been uploaded or edited (for instance, to trim a video) in the last 3 months (U.S. East datacenter region) or 6 months (for other regions hosting Stream services like the other U.S. regions and EMEA).

In other words, Microsoft is stopping the automatic generation of transcripts for new videos and removing transcripts previously generated for some older videos. This doesn’t affect the storage of videos; it is all to do with their transcripts, which are a significant accessibility feature for people to follow what’s happening in a video. Figure 1 shows an example of the transcript viewed alongside a video recording for my “Talking Teams” interview with Rish Tandon, Microsoft VP for Teams Development.

If someone views an older video, Stream will regenerate the transcript. The same will happen if an owner edits video details and chooses to regenerate the captions (Figure 2) which make up the transcript.

Microsoft will not remove transcripts for videos when:

• The transcript has been edited (for example, to correct some of the phrasing generated by automatic transcription). Although the automatic transcript is OK for most videos, it can have problems with idioms, unclear speech, and when people talk over each other.
• Transcripts are uploaded manually.
• Videos are active. To qualify, videos are uploaded, edited, or viewed in the last six months.

Interestingly, closed captions remain available for all videos.

Why is this Happening?

It’s reasonable to ask why Microsoft is cleaning out old Stream transcripts. Cynics will say that it’s a cost-saving measure to drive profits and point to the recent announcement about increased monthly fees for Office 365 plans. I think the answer is a little more prosaic. Microsoft is preparing for a migration. The nature of migrations is that they are often painful, complex operations. Removing data that doesn’t need to be migrated makes sense, so the possible reason is that Microsoft wants to clean out transcripts for videos which haven’t been watched or edited in a while so that they don’t need to migrate the data to ODSP. Given that transcripts probably need some massaging on ODSP to be indexed and become searchable there, this is a plausible driver.

Microsoft isn’t saying why the clean-out is happening but given that the migration is expected sometime early in 2022, it really doesn’t matter. After all, if someone notices that a transcript is missing for an antique video, it’s easy to regenerate it.

Teams Meeting Recordings a Big Demand on the System

Microsoft is in the middle of building Stream for SharePoint (the new Stream). Part of the transition is to move video storage away from a dedicated Stream repository in Azure to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Office 365 tenants can move recordings of new Teams meetings to OneDrive for Business now with the transition of existing videos to the new Stream when it becomes available during 2021.

Update: Migration from Stream Classic to Stream based on SharePoint is still not generally available.

Because it has its own repository, the classic Stream controls its storage. Tenants receive a base amount of 500 GB plus 0.5 GB per licensed user (all Office 365 enterprise users are licensed for Stream). A tenant with 1,000 users therefore receives 1.5 TB of Stream storage. If more storage is needed, it can be bought from Microsoft.

Teams Recordings Drive Stream Storage

According to Microsoft sources, a large percentage of Stream storage is consumed by Teams meeting recordings. With over 500,000 users, Accenture runs the world’s largest Teams deployment, consuming 350 million minutes of audio meetings and 90 million minutes of video meetings monthly. Heavily influenced by the change of working habits due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the growth in online meetings is representative of many organizations, and 115 million monthly active Teams users generate lots of meetings. Many meetings are recorded, and the amount of Stream storage used by Teams continues to grow. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft chose to move Teams recordings to OneDrive for Business as the first step in the transition to the new Stream.

Removing Old Recordings

Meeting recordings are most useful soon after an event. Once people have had a chance to review a recording, the value of keeping most recordings declines over time. Classic Stream has no way to age out old recordings, and while Microsoft is working on a policy to expire Teams meetings automatically after a set period, that feature isn’t yet available.

The net result is that quota consumption continues unabated unless meeting organizers (the owners of the recordings) proactively remove old recordings. This doesn’t happen in the real world.

Quota Management in Stream for SharePoint

In Stream for SharePoint, recordings are stored in the OneDrive for Business account of the person who initiates the recording. The question then arises about what happens to the storage quota assigned to tenants for classic Stream?

The answer is that the quota doesn’t transfer. Videos stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business count against the tenant’s SharePoint storage quota (for videos owned by a Microsoft 365 group) or an individual’s OneDrive storage quota. Although this seems unfair, it’s not in practice because Microsoft makes large amounts of storage available to OneDrive for Business accounts, including “beyond 1 TB, to unlimited” for enterprise users. Given that most Stream storage is consumed by Teams recordings and these files will now be in OneDrive for Business, no need exists to transfer the classic Stream quota.

You might still want to run reports to check on OneDrive for Business storage, just in case some users need an increase in their assigned quota. The demand on quota should reduce after Microsoft introduces the policy to age out old recordings. In the interim, you can make sure that everyone can store all the meeting recordings they need by bumping the default OneDrive storage quota from 1 TB to 5 TB by editing the setting in the SharePoint admin center (Figure 1).

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Teams Meeting Recordings Moving from Stream Classic to ODSP

Updated: June 9, 2021

Announced at Ignite 2020, the move for Teams video recordings to use OneDrive storage is now in place (the move is really to store Teams meeting recordings in both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, or ODSP for short). Tenants have been able to opt-in to use OneDrive to store recordings of Teams meetings since mid-October 2020.

The timeline for the roll-out has gone through several revisions but is currently:

• October 19, 2020: Tenants can opt to use OneDrive to store new recordings of Teams meetings. (Complete).
• January 7, 2021: All new recordings of Teams meetings are stored in OneDrive unless the organization explicitly choses to continue using Stream by updating their meeting policies. (Complete).
• August 16, 2021: An incremental roll-out begins to switch tenants to store new recordings of Teams meetings to OneDrive even if their meeting policies are set to use Stream.

The most recent change removed the March 1, 2021 deadline for commercial and GCC tenants to move to OneDrive. Microsoft is also now saying that the roll-out in July to switch all tenants over to OneDrive will be incremental rather than a hard date. Commercial and GCC tenants now share a common date with education tenants, to which Microsoft had previously extended support until July to accommodate the school year.

Updating Teams Meeting Policies

Control over the choice of storage location is accomplished by updating Teams meeting policies to switch the RecordingStorageMode setting from Stream (the default) to OneDriveForBusiness. This currently can’t be done through the Teams admin center, but it’s an easy update to do in PowerShell using the latest Teams PowerShell module. This module contains the old Skype for Business Online cmdlets needed to update policies. With the module installed we can do the following ($O365Cred is a variable populated using the Get-Credential cmdlet). In this example, we update a single meeting policy to instruct Teams to store the recordings started by the users assigned the policy in OneDrive for Business.

# Connect to Teams and update the meeting policy
Connect-MicrosoftTeams -Credential $O365Cred
# Update the Teams meeting policy for US employees so that their meeting recordings are stored in OneDrive
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "U.S. Region Workers" -RecordingStorageMode OneDriveForBusiness

Update May 13, 2021: The latest version of the Teams PowerShell module is 2.3.1.

OneDrive Means SharePoint as Well

Saying that the storage is OneDrive for Business is a little misleading, but it might be explained because recordings for personal and group chats as well as meetings organized by a person and not tied to a channel end up in OneDrive. Channel meetings end up in the document library SharePoint team site for the team. In both cases, a folder called Recordings is used.

When the switch is effective, users see that recordings are being saved to OneDrive rather than Stream (Figure 1).

One thing I noticed is that those who record meetings do not receive email to tell them that their recording is ready to view. This might be linked with the lack of post-processing currently done when videos are stored in OneDrive for Business.

In this instance, the meeting is in a channel, so the recording is saved in SharePoint. We can see the MP4 file for the recording through the Teams Files channel tab, or by opening SharePoint. Figure 2 shows three recording files stored in the Recordings folder for a channel. Because SharePoint treats recordings like any other file, you can amend their properties, assign retention labels (but not yet sensitivity labels), and share them with other users, including people outside the tenant (subject to the restriction capability for the site).

Permissions for meeting recordings stored in OneDrive are limited to internal users, even if guests participate in the call. If it is necessary to share a recording with an external user, the owner (the person who started the recording) must update the sharing list to include that user. Channel recordings stored in SharePoint can be accessed by any team member.

Teams Meeting Recordings and Storage

Only new recordings are stored for now, but Microsoft says they will deliver facilities to move old recordings over from Stream to OneDrive. When this happens, the storage currently charged against the Stream storage quota for the tenant will be absorbed by OneDrive and SharePoint quotas. You might then have to pay more attention to reporting the amount of storage consumed in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Ups and Downs, but Mostly Up

Being able to share meeting recordings outside the tenant is a major change over the capabilities available in classic Stream that will be welcomed by many. Some downsides do exist. For instance, the automatic transcript and captions created by Stream and features like video trim and noise suppression aren’t yet available for videos stored in OneDrive. Microsoft is working to close any functionality gaps and are confident that everything will be in place to allow a complete switchover from classic Stream as scheduled.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook will cover the transition of video content from classic Stream to Stream 2.0 as it unfolds. Being able to change to reflect the actual state of Office 365 is a big advantage of an eBook.

When Videos Need More Post-Production

Sometimes videos uploaded to Microsoft Stream need a little more post-production work than is possible with a simple trim from the start and/or end. You might want to remove some content from the middle, add graphics and captions, or otherwise enhance the effectiveness of the content.

Video owners and Stream admins can download a video, process it with a video editor like TechSmith Camtasia, and replace it with an updated version (or overwrite a video with a completely new file). Replacing a video keeps its link, which means that the new file will play anywhere the link is used (like in a Teams channel tab or web page). In addition, many of the video attributes are retained:

• Video details, like name, description, and language.
• Permissions.
• Comments, likes, and view history.

However, because the content of the video changes, anything based on the content is not retained. This includes:

• The original transcript is replaced by a new transcript generated after the new file is uploaded to Stream.
• New thumbnails are also generated to replace those generated from the original video.
• If Forms are linked to the original video, the links are removed (because they depend on specific timelines in the video) and you’ll have to reinsert the Forms at the appropriate times in the replacement video.
• The people timeline generated for the original video is no longer available. As Stream no longer generates people timelines for videos, one will not be created for the replacement video.

Replacing a Stream Video

1. If you plan to edit the original video, download it from Stream and do whatever processing is needed. Otherwise, locate the replacement video file. Even if you plan to replace the video with a brand new file, it’s a good idea to download the original as there’s no way to restore a video in Stream after the replacement happens unless you have a copy of the original file.
2. Select the video you want to replace in Stream and choose Replace video from the […] menu (Figure 1).
3. Choose the video file to replace the original and click Replace (Figure 2).
4. Stream uploads the replacement video and swaps it for the original. The normal processing for a new video occurs to generate the automatic transcript. After a short delay, the replacement video will be available. Like what happens following the upload of a new video, the video owner receives an email notification when the replacement video is in place.

Audit Records

Stream logs a StreamInvokeVideoUpload audit record when the replacement video is uploaded and a StreamEditVideo record when the replacement is made. Unfortunately, the file name of the replacement video is not captured.

Need more information about Microsoft Stream? You’ll find it in Chapter 16 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Subscribe now and receive monthly updates to know about new developments inside Office 365.

Edge Now the Preferred Microsoft 365 Browser

Even if you spend time reading all that’s posted to the Microsoft Technical Community, you might have missed the August 17 post announcing that Microsoft 365 will soon end support for Internet Explorer 11. In a nutshell, support in Teams finishes on November 30, 2020 while August 17, 2021 is when support ceases in other Microsoft 365 browser apps like OWA, Planner, To Do, and Yammer plus all the administrative portals.

Microsoft’s advice is unambiguous: use Edge (the Chromium-based version). The legacy (original) version of Edge stops getting security updates on March 9, 2021. Curiously, Microsoft refers to legacy Edge as a “desktop app” instead of a browser, but I guess that’s just a matter of semantics.

Teams First to Dump Internet Explorer

While the other Microsoft 365 apps have a year left to support Internet Explorer, Teams stops in just over a quarter. Microsoft doesn’t explain why they want to accelerate deprecation of IE11 support in Teams, but it might be linked to the lack of calling and video support in IE11 for Teams meetings. Given the massive upswing of demand for Teams meetings since the pandemic started, it’s unsurprising that Microsoft would want to make sure that Teams users avoid Internet Explorer.

I doubt the demise of IE11 will cause many problems for Teams users. Mac users are more concerned about Safari support for Teams (audio is supported in meetings, but video is not). Linux users who don’t use the Teams Linux client have Chrome and Firefox browsers to choose from.

Another point to consider is that Teams uses a three-week update cycle to make new functionality available to clients. The longer IE11 remains supported, the further it falls behind in terms of the new meeting functionality recently introduced for Teams.

IE Gets More Time in Other Microsoft 365 Apps

Microsoft 365 has a bunch of browser clients, some of which are refreshed almost as quickly as Teams is (OWA is an example). The longer time allowed before the Microsoft 365 apps stop supporting IE11 might be linked to the relatively straightforward nature of the apps. SharePoint Online and Stream both support IE11 only in document mode, perhaps because of the video playback capabilities available in both clients. Forms, on the other hand, also supports video playback, but proclaims itself to be optimized for IE11.

Move Now

No matter what the reason is, the simple fact is that IE11 has a limited lifetime inside Microsoft 365. It’s time to move any IE11 diehards to one of the supported browsers, unless they enjoy discovering just what Microsoft means by “customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE11.”

Degraded could be anything from “a feature just doesn’t work” to “a feature works slowly.” Being unable to connect is more fundamental but could come about through something like a change in conditional access policies which IE11 can’t handle. In either case, the experience is unlikely to be anything to write home about. Time to move. And soon.

The September 2020 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook will remove most mentions of IE11 (there are twelve right now). It’s one of the nice things about having a book that’s updated monthly. When Microsoft changes, we do too.

Stream administration includes an option to Manage delete users (Figure 1).

The idea is that if someone’s account is removed from an Office 365 tenant, you should be able to remove any reference to that person in Stream (names of video owners, comments, etc.) and replace it something like “Former Colleague.” You don’t have to do this for deleted users – it’s really just to make it clear to other people that the person who made a contribution to Stream is no longer available and cannot be contacted.

How Azure Active Directory Accounts are Deleted

When an Azure AD account is deleted, it enters a soft-deleted state in the Azure AD recycle bin which allows the account to be recovered if necessary. This state lasts for 30 days. After this, Azure AD hard-deletes the account and it becomes irrecoverable.

When you look at the Stream option, it’s natural to assume that Stream will search for soft-deleted Azure AD accounts, much like the Deleted users option works in the Microsoft 365 admin center. But it doesn’t. Instead, Stream only allows you to select a deleted user after Azure AD has permanently removed its account.

Why Stream Waits

There’s a certain logic here. Stream doesn’t want you to remove references to users when the possibility still exists that an admin might recover the account. If that happens, you want the references to the account to be intact in Stream, and this is why Stream waits until an account is finally gone before allowing an admin to manage the account. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if you accelerate the removal of a soft-deleted user object by hard-deleting it with PowerShell.

I’m not sure that Manage deleted users is a good name for the option. Manage implies that you can do more with deleted accounts than is possible. All Stream does is an edit pass through its store to replace any reference to a deleted user with a string supplied by an admin (Figure 2). You’ll do this in a state of imperfect knowledge because there’s no way to get a list of videos owned by a deleted user beforehand or know what comments they made or the comments where they’re referenced.

I’m sure the way Stream works is frustrating to some. It would be better if Stream showed a list of soft-deleted Azure AD accounts with their deleted date so that people would know why they can’t select an account. It would also be nice if Stream checked if an account had been hard-deleted from the Azure AD recycle bin to allow tenants to accelerate the process. But you can’t have everything and the feature works, even if it follows its own logic.

Limit Kept at 20,000 for Live Events Organized in Teams, Yammer, and Stream

Reflecting the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic means that people can no longer gather in large numbers for in-person events, in May 2020 Microsoft temporarily increased the normal attendee limit for live events run through Teams, Yammer, or Stream. The increase is from 10,000 to 20,000 attendees.

Since the limit was increased, Microsoft has reviewed and extended it several times. As the pandemic continues and it will take time for vaccines to be deployed, Microsoft has now extended the limit until June 30, 2021 (Office 365 notification MC225752 updated 17 December). After this point, a Teams advanced communications license will be needed to organize a live event for more than 10,000 participants or lasting more than four hours. That’s good for Teams, but Microsoft hasn’t said how tenants can license large Live events organized through Yammer or Stream.

For customers needing to run even larger online events, Microsoft has a live events assistance program that can increase the limit for an event to 100,000 attendees, which should be enough to cater for even the largest events.

Online Events Popular While In-Person Events Decline

Pretty well every in-person technology conference of any size scheduled for 2020 has been recast as an online event and all Microsoft events will be online until at least July 1, 2021.

Of course, many things must fall into place before a large-scale in-person event becomes feasible again. I hope this happens as I miss the buzz of large crowds and the chance to gorge on technology for a few days. I guess I must be weird…

Listen to Speech not Background Noise

Office 365 Notification MC215351 June 5 tells us that “Noise suppression for recorded videos in Microsoft Stream will reach generally availability later this month.” Microsoft showed off noise suppression at the Ignite 2019 conference to show how speech could be better distinguished from background noises like a hammer drill during video playback. The update is now rolling out and is due to complete worldwide deployment in July.

The feature works by isolating speech from other sources of noise to make speech clearer. Isolation can occur when a video is uploaded to Steam or afterwards by updating video settings. The extra processing needed when noise suppression is enabled means that new videos take a little longer to become fully available after upload. Microsoft hasn’t quantified just how much additional overhead is incurred to do the extra processing, but it isn’t very noticeable in any of the videos I tested.

Given the way that Microsoft reduced some of the processing load for different Office 365 services since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s surprising that they should choose to enable features that incur new load now. Perhaps this is a sign that things are slowly returning to a state when Microsoft can restore the features they throttled in March and April.

Enabling Noise Suppression

Noise suppression can be enabled when a new video is uploaded to Stream or by updating the settings for existing videos. In both cases, you set the noise suppression slider to on in video options (Figure 1). For existing videos, you’ll need to select the video first and then access Update video details (pencil icon).

If noise suppression isn’t supported for the chosen video, you won’t see the option.

When noise suppression is enabled for a video (and the video has been processed), viewers have the option to keep noise suppression on or turn it off during playback (Figure 2).

Qualifying Videos

There’s no need to upload existing videos again as Stream can process them behind the scenes for noise suppression. Video owners and Stream admins can enable noise suppression for existing videos if the videos meet certain criteria, including:

• The video is two hours or shorter and no larger than 3 GB.
• An audio track is available, but not when multiple audio tracks in different languages exist in a video.
• The video is not a recording of a Teams meeting. This is because noise suppression is automatically done when Teams meetings are recorded.

Noise suppression isn’t supported for Live Events. This shouldn’t be an issue because of the structured nature of these events where better microphones are often used.

Sparse Troubleshooting

Microsoft documentation for noise suppression is sparse and it seems like the feature either works or it doesn’t. The troubleshooting page even includes the statement: “There are some scenarios where noise suppression, even when turned on by video owners, doesn’t work for video viewers. We don’t always know why.” Quite!

Noise suppression is a great example of a change in detail that easily missed. By subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, there’s more of a chance that you’ll stay informed.

Stream Doesn’t Support Office 365 Retention Policies

Usage of Microsoft Stream is very high at present, largely driven by storage of Teams meeting recordings and Teams Live Events. This is goodness, but the increased use is revealing some flaws in Stream, such as the lack of support for Office 365 retention policies. At their Microsoft Stream Under the hood session at the Ignite 2019 conference, the development group promised that Stream will support retention policies “in 2020.” The need to keep the service running at a time of high demand might have stopped progress in this space.

When a video owner deletes a video, it goes into the Stream recycle bin and remains there for 30 days. This period allows owners to recover videos deleted in error. After the period elapses, Stream removes the video and the content is irrecoverable.

Exploring the Stream Recycle Bin

Although Stream administrators can see videos deleted by anyone in the tenant in the Stream recycle bin (Figure 1), a danger exists that a video which should be kept might slip through the cracks and be deleted. People in the compliance world worry about this kind of thing because someone could try to remove evidence of a policy violation by deleting recordings of Teams meetings where misdoings were discussed.

While waiting for Microsoft to bring Stream into the full Office 365 compliance framework (spanning retention policies, labels, and holds among other features), it’s possible to build a review mechanism to have someone check videos in the recycle bin to figure out if they should be kept. It’s a form of manual disposition, to use Microsoft’s term for a manual review of an item before it is disposed of.

To achieve the goal, I looked in the Office 365 audit log for StreamDeleteVideo events, which are logged when an owner deletes a video. It doesn’t take much to search for these events over the last 30 days and extract the relevant data, such as the name of the video and who deleted it.

Generating an HTML Report

After processing the audit events, I create an HTML report file (Figure 2). To help identify videos that are approaching deletion, the days since deletion and days remaining are calculated by subtracting the timestamp of the audit event from the current date. Someone creative could take other approaches to highlight entries in the list, such as using different colors for videos approaching their final deletion.

Emailing the Report

Generating a report is one step, making sure that its content is reviewed and actioned is another. To help things along, the script emails a copy to someone selected to review videos and decide if any should be kept. Figure 3 shows the report as it appears in OWA.

Emailing reports is easy with the Send-MailMessage cmdlet. In this case, the HTML content is imported as the message body, we add message properties such as the recipients, sender, and subject, and send it off. Using Send-MailMessage in this way is a good example of the kind of script that will need to be updated when Microsoft removes basic authentication support for SMTP AUTH connections.

The script can be accessed in GitHub. Feel free to create your own version and let us know what improvements you make by posting a comment here.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes a full chapter about Stream. Like everything else in the book, the Stream content is reviewed and updated when changes happen.

Many Ways to Get a Video Into Stream

Equipped with a suitable license, Office 365 users can upload content (in supported formats) to Stream in various ways:

• Uploading a video file created elsewhere to the Stream portal.
• With the Stream mobile app.
• Making a screen capture video with Stream.
• Recording a Teams meeting.
• Running a Live Event with Teams or Yammer.

Apart from people with frontline licenses, licensed users can upload a video to Stream. To accommodate uploads, Office 365 enterprise tenants are assigned 500 GB of video storage plus 0.5 GB of extra storage for every licensed user (except frontline users). You can discover how much Stream storage your tenant has consumed through the Stream admin settings (Figure 1).

All uploaded videos count against the overall quota for the tenant. The exact size of a video depends on its format, quality, and length. As a guide, expect to use approximately 7.5 MB per minute of 1080p MP4 video with smaller amounts consumed for lower-quality video. Stream counts the original file size of the uploaded video against the quota and doesn’t take other factors such as the size of transcoded videos and caption files into account.

Demand for Teams Recordings

When Microsoft originally created Stream, they probably anticipated that most videos uploaded would be high-quality corporate videos produced using professional equipment. Today, the reality is different and many organizations find that the demand for Stream recordings comes from Teams meetings.

Although it’s easy to discover how much of the assigned storage has been consumed, it’s harder to get other information out of Stream, like the size of an individual video. Without that information, you can’t discover who is uploading the big videos which consume all the storage without downloading the videos to note their size on disk.

Use the Audit Log

What you can do is use the Office 365 audit log to track who’s uploading videos to Stream. This example shows how to run the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet to find video upload events. The returned set are then analyzed to extract information about the video.

$StartDate = (Get-Date).AddDays(-90); $EndDate = (Get-Date) #Maximum search range for audit log for E3 users
$Records = (Search-UnifiedAuditLog -Operations StreamInvokeVideoUpload -StartDate $StartDate -EndDate $EndDate -ResultSize 2000)
If ($Records.Count -eq 0) {
    Write-Host "No audit records for Stream video uploads found." }
Else {
    Write-Host "Processing" $Records.Count "audit records..."
    $Report = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new() # Create output file for report
    # Scan each audit record to extract information
    ForEach ($Rec in $Records) {
      $AuditData = ConvertFrom-Json $Rec.Auditdata
        $ReportLine = [PSCustomObject] @{
           TimeStamp = Get-Date($AuditData.CreationTime) -format g
           User      = $AuditData.UserId
           Action    = $AuditData.Operation
           VideoURL  = $AuditData.ResourceURL
           VideoName = $AuditData.ResourceTitle }
      $Report.Add($ReportLine) } }

Remember that Office 365 only stores 90 days of audit data for E3 accounts, so if you want to go back further, you’ll need to either extract and store information on an ongoing basis or use a third-party reporting app. For output, you could pipe the data to the Out-GridView cmdlet or create a CSV file:

$Report | Sort {$_.TimeStamp -as [DateTime]} -Unique -Descending | Out-GridView

Report | Sort {$_.TimeStamp -as [DateTime]} -Unique -Descending | Export-CSV -NoTypeInformation c:\temp\ExportStreamVideos.csv

Using a figure for video storage of 400 MB/hour, you could even calculate how much of the tenant’s Stream quota is being consumed by each user.

The report data also allows us to do some basic analysis, such as finding out who uploads most videos:

$Report | Group User | Sort Count -Descending | Format-Table Name, Count

Name                               Count
----                               -----
Jane.Nix@office365itpros.com          74
James.Ryan@office365itpros.com        22
John.Hubbard@office365itpros.com      17
James.Joyce@office365itpros.com       15
Ben.Owens@office365itpros.com          9

Reporting Video Views

If you replace StreamInvokeVideoUpload (upload a video event) with StreamInvokeVideoUpView (view a video event) in the Search-UnifiedAuditLog command, you’ll create a report of Stream view events to know who’s looking at videos and what the most popular videos are. To see a summary, you change the Group command slightly to:

$Report | Group-Object Property VideoName | Sort Count -Descending |Format-Table Name, Count
Name                                     Count
----                                     -----
Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams Activity     19
Call with Kim Akers                          7
Successfully Manage Microsoft Teams          7
Troubleshooting PowerShell                   4
Have you seen my Exchange server             3

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is full of bright ideas like this. Subscribe now and make sure you’re not left behind by the rapid pace of change in Office 365.

Stream’s New Record Screen Option

Announced in a blog post on May 6 (without any notification in the Microsoft 365 admin center), Stream’s new screen recording feature is now available to Office 365 tenants worldwide. The idea is simple. It’s a way to create short (up to 15 minute) videos using content that can be captured from your screen. For example, you might want to record how to do something in an application or, less positively, how to reproduce a bug.

Screen recording works with Chrome (version 74 and above), Edge, and Brave browsers on Windows and MacOS workstations. Safari on MacOS is not supported and audio capture is only available on Windows. Naturally, your Office 365 account needs to be assigned a Stream license to be able to use Stream to capture screen content.

Recording a Screen Capture

To create a record, select Record screen from the Create menu (Figure 1). There’s no way for an Office 365 tenant to remove this option from Stream.

To begin, Stream loads a dialog to allow you to select which camera and microphone to use (Figure 2). You can only capture camera content when recording the entire screen. This might be a limitation of Stream being a web application (pure speculation on my part). In any case, it’s unlikely that you’ll use this facility to capture carefully scripted personal videos. Other and better tools like Techsmith Camtasia or even PowerPoint are available for that kind of production. You can’t apply effects like background blur or a background image when capturing via the camera.

Capturing Screen Content

Click the Start recording button and Stream asks you to select which part of the screen you want to capture (Figure 3). You can choose the complete screen (needed to include the camera), and application window (something like Outlook), or a browser tab.

The selected portion of the screen is shared, and Stream is ready to capture whatever appears once you start recording. Once you press the record button, Stream goes through a brief countdown before recording starts. You can stop and restart the recording at any time to make adjustments, take a break, or skip uninteresting events. The only thing to remember is that the maximum length of the video is 15 minutes. Microsoft suggests that you should break recording up into different videos if you need to record longer segments.

If you select a specific application or window, you can only record from that window. You can’t switch and combine different windows. If you need to capture content from multiple windows, record your entire screen.

Uploading to Stream

When the information you want to capture is complete, click the record button again to stop recording. You can now play back what’s been captured to check that it’s acceptable. For example, you might check that the sound levels are OK and everything you need is in the video. If everything’s OK, click Upload to Stream to release the captured content to Stream for further processing. As is normal for Stream videos, you’re asked to enter a name, description, and language for the video (Figure 4). You can also amend the permissions to restrict access to the video when it’s available in Stream.

Processing and Playback

Two choices are available to saving the video in Stream. You can:

• Save as draft: The video is saved and accessible in Stream under My Content > Videos. You have the chance to update video metadata, permissions, or trim the video if necessary to remove unwanted content from the start and end of the video. When you’re ready to make the video available to a wider audience, you can set the permissions to allow access for the entire organization to restrict it to certain groups or channels.
• Publish: This action makes the video available immediately to “everyone in the company.” If you don’t want everyone to be able to view the video, uncheck the box before publication. A Go to Video link takes you to the uploaded video.

Screen captures are usually short, so they should be available in Stream soon after publication. Once processing finishes, the video can be played back (Figure 5). Playback proceeds like other videos uploaded to Stream. However, I found that processing didn’t generate the automatic transcript available for other recordings, like those for Teams meetings, even after setting the video language during the upload process (you can see this done in Figure 4). The solution is to update video details in Stream to set the language. Stream will then create the transcript. I’m sure this is a bug that Microsoft will fix quickly.

It’s easy to make the video available to other people from Stream by creating a link and sharing it via email or Teams (as a link pasted in a message or to create a channel tab).

Example Recording

As an example, I recorded a screen capture to show how to run the Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams activity report PowerShell script. There’s some interference in the capture right at the start. It’s a good idea to wait for a couple of seconds at the start of a recording to let everything settle down before beginning to speak or record content. You can always trim the excess content after uploading a video. In this case, I couldn’t trim because of the voiceover. Oh well, better luck next time.

Here’s the screen capture video that I recorded.

Screen capture in Stream is a small feature that’s a great example of things that can slip through the cracks and remain unnoticed. Stay updated by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

When Stream Refuses to Store a Teams Meeting Recording

Stream is the video service for Microsoft 365. A lot of the activity in Stream is driven by processing and viewing of Teams meeting recordings. Microsoft’s advice about how to record a Teams meeting gives all the details of how to record a meeting and save the recording in Stream. What it doesn’t tell you is how to deal with the situation where a recording can’t be stored in Stream (Figure 1).

No Stream License, No Recordings Saved

The most common reason why this happens is when the person who records the meeting isn’t licensed to use Stream. Microsoft bundled a Stream license into all Office 365 enterprise plans, so it’s unusual to have a situation like that shown in Figure 2 where an account is assigned an Office 365 E5 license, but Stream is disabled. Nevertheless, based on the number of questions about why recordings fail, it’s obvious that some tenants remove Stream licenses from accounts (maybe using PowerShell as explained in this article).

It’s possible that tenants disabled Stream in the past because they didn’t think that Stream was needed. However, if you want to capture recordings for Teams meetings, you need a Stream license. Accounts also need Stream licenses to view videos stored in Stream. including when links to Teams meeting recordings are posted in chats or channels.

Restricted Uploads for Stream

Another reason why people can’t upload to Stream is that the tenant has restricted the set of people allowed to create new videos in Stream (Figure 3). This control might have been set at a time when Stream acted as the repository for company-produced videos and only official videos ended up in the portal. It’s inappropriate when you want users to store Teams recordings in Stream.

Stream’s Connection to Teams

The process of recording a Teams meeting goes like this:

• Stream regards whoever records the meeting as the owner. The owner is the account that can set permissions on a video once it is processed and stored in Stream.
• When recording starts, a bot joins the meeting to capture the media stream.
• When recording finishes, the media stream is saved in Stream for further processing, like adding the automatic transcript and generating recordings in different formats.
• Stream then tries to save the recording in the owner’s account. This fails because the account is not licensed.
• Instead of posting a link to the processed recording in the conversation, Teams posts a link to the raw video. This is what has happened in Figure 1.

Rescuing Unsaved Meeting Recordings

The solution to the problem is to make sure that anyone who records Teams meetings is assigned a Stream license. To fix the problem with an unprocessed recording, for up to 21 days after the meeting ends, any team member can download the video (an MP4 file) from Teams and save it to their workstation (Figure 4). Teams automatically removes the video after 21 days.

Next, the user can upload the recording to Stream (they’ll need a license to do this), add the necessary properties (Figure 5), and Stream will process the recording as normal.

The person who uploads the recording to Stream is now its owner. They can share the recording with the people who need access. They can also get a link to the video from Stream and post the link to Teams to allow team members to access the recording (Figure 6).

As reported in this article, some Office 365 datacenter regions do not support the Stream service, which prevents users from being able to record meetings. Microsoft plans to allow tenants to opt for storage in the closest region which supports Stream. That plan should have come into effect by now but has been delayed.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is full of practical advice like this. Subscribe to receive monthly updates to refresh your knowledge and keep it current.

No More People Timelines in Stream

On May 1, Microsoft announced in message center notification MC211744 that Stream would no longer generate a people timeline for videos after June 1, 2020 and that they would retire the feature and remove all people timeline data permanently by July 15, 2020.

The reason Microsoft cites for the decision is “low feature usage.” Microsoft also points out that this is during a time of “unprecedented growth” for Stream, largely driven by the growth of Teams to 75 million users and the consequential demand for processing of Teams meetings stored in Stream, including the recent addition of recordings for 1:1 Teams meetings.

Generation of People Timeline

The people timeline is one of the AI-powered features available in Stream to all Office 365 plans. When Stream processes a video, it applies a face recognition process to create a people timeline. The people timeline is accessible in the People link under the video (occasionally Stream can’t process a video to find faces and no People link is available).

The people timeline shows when the individuals (or rather, their faces) appear in the video as detected by Stream when it processed the video.  Figure 1 shows Stream playing a video recorded at AvePoint’s ShiftHappens event in 2019 when I was interviewed by Paul Thurrott. Stream detected two faces. You can see how the slider is used in the timeline to go to different places in the video where a selected individual appears.

Although people timeline generation worked acceptably well for videos taped in studio or other controlled settings, it had its problems. Sometimes Stream failed to detect faces or missed some of the speakers in a video. Sometimes it found multiple examples of the same person, and sometimes it just failed to work and didn’t generate a people timeline. There’s no way to request Stream to reprocess a video if it fails to create a people timeline on the first pass.

Many Videos Don’t Include Faces to Process

I’m sure Microsoft’s famous telemetry guided this decision and it’s probably true that people timelines are not a heavily used feature, especially when so many videos processed by Stream are recordings of Teams meetings when not everyone turns their video on. Figure 2 shows what a recording of a Teams meeting between 3 people often looks like. One person has a background effect enabled (but the camera is blocked) while the other two don’t have video turned on. Face detection doesn’t perform well in these circumstances.

Blurring and Backgrounds Don’t Help Either

It’s also possible that using custom background effects in Teams meetings creates processing challenges for Stream. Due to the way background blur and effects work, peoples’ faces can “float” in and out of the video feed as they move backwards and forwards (the same thing happens with other platforms like Zoom). Having a face disappear and reappear probably drives the face timeline algorithm crazy.

It’s also likely that face detection absorbs too many valuable resources at a time when every CPU cycle is needed to meet growing customer demand. As part of its initial response to throttle consumption of resources within Office 365, Microsoft reduced the standard definition for Teams recordings to 720p; cutting the people timeline seems like it might be another casualty of the boom in Teams usage.

Putting all the pieces together to make Office 365 work takes a lot of effort and knowledge. Learn from the best by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We do the heavy lifting so you don’t need to.

Closes Gap in Teams Meetings Recording Spectrum

In a surprise announcement (MC210451), Microsoft said that Teams “convenience recording” is now available for 1:1 calls. The feature seems to be already available, but this might depend on some software reaching your tenant, a process that can take some time given the distributed nature of Office 365.

Support was already available to record group calls (more than two people), but now you can record Teams calls with just one other person. I have no idea why Microsoft calls this convenience recording.

There doesn’t seem to be a Microsoft 365 roadmap item for this development, which might account for why Microsoft apologizes “for not communicating sooner.”

How 1:1 Call Recording Works

Recording happens with any other Teams call. One of the two people on the call selects the Start Recording option in the call menu. For now, the Allow Cloud Recording setting in the meeting policy assigned to the account must allow them to record, but Microsoft says that they’re working on a separate policy setting to control 1:1 calls.

When the call completes, the recording is processed in Stream (Figure 1), from where it can be shared or added to a channel. The person who starts the recording is deemed to be the owner of the recording, which is important because they’re the only one who can manage the recording in Stream. They also receive the email notification the recording is processed.

Recording Posted in Chat

The call is also posted to the 1:1 chat and both participants can access it there (Figure 2) by opening the file stored in Stream. This works well when both participants have accounts in the same tenant, but the lack of external sharing capabilities in Stream is one of the reasons why Teams is moving its storage for recordings to OneDrive for Business.

However, only the owner can share the recording from the chat. At first glance, the only sharing option seems to be to make the recording available to the entire organization, which seems bizarre given that 1:1 calls tend to be private. The … link brings you to the Stream Manage permission dialog, which is where you can apply some granular permissions.

Known Limitations

Microsoft document a couple of limitations in the current implementation.

• Calls can only be recorded between two Teams clients. You can’t record calls if they involve people dialing in or if the call is federated to Skype for Business Online or Skype consumer users.
• If you add extra people to a 1:1 call (thus creating a group call), the recording is posted in the 1:1 chat where the call starts instead to the expanded chat. To make the recording available, the owner must share the Stream recording with the added participants (or the file in OneDrive for Business, if that’s where the recordings are stored).

Rushed for Now

Although welcome, the oddly branded convenience recording seems a little rushed. Perhaps Microsoft is responding to a need to help people working from home who must record calls for certain topics, like financial transactions. In any case, it’s good to have the feature.

New developments come thick and fast in Office 365. This one affects two or maybe three chapters of the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook. Luckily we release an update every month to make sure our subscribers are always up to date.

Multiple Forms of Teams Meetings

Recently I discussed the difference between personal Teams meetings and channel meetings. Let’s throw Teams Live Events into the mix and give some guidance about when you might want to run a live event instead of a regular Teams meetings.

Live and Structured Events

A Microsoft 365 live event is a structured form of meeting intended to be used for large-scale information dissemination such as company announcements, product launches, town halls, training, and so on. A live event can last up to four hours and can be created using Teams, Stream, or Yammer. The advantage of using Teams is that the integration of Live events into Teams makes setup and production of events very easy. Behind the scenes, Stream takes care of all the video processing, creation of captions and transcripts, analytics, and transcoding of the content for adaptive delivery to viewers. In other words, making sure that different forms of devices (workstations, browsers, and mobile) receive content in an appropriate form for them to consume.

Teams live events are available in the commercial version of Teams, including the government cloud.

Teams live events are created in the Teams calendar app in much the same way as a personal or channel meeting by selecting Live event from the New meeting drop-down menu. Figure 1 shows the screen used to father event information, including some of the roles played by different people in the event.

The person who creates the live event is its organizer and its producer. Although other roles are available, like presenter (people entitled to speak and share content), a single person can do everything needed to run a live event. The event organizer must have an Exchange Online mailbox together with licenses for Teams and Stream. They must also have an Office 365 enterprise license (E3 or E5 or academic/government equivalents). Anonymous access is fully supported for attending live events.

It’s important to realize that Teams creates different joining links for presenters and attendees. The link used by presenters gives them the ability to speak and present material; the one used by participants allows them to listen. Don’t mix up the links you send to people! The event invitation for presenters contains a warning that you shouldn’t forward the invitation and instead should add extra presenters to Teams. This is to make sure that presenter links only go to people who need that level of access.

Live Event Permissions

The next step is to select the audience for the event. Three options exist (Figure 2):

• Limit the event to specific people and groups.
• Limit the event to anyone in the organization.
• Open the event to the world (including anonymous access).

Organizers can choose anonymous access for an event if permitted by the live events policy assigned to their account. Live events policies are managed in the Teams Admin Center (Figure 3). Another important setting in this policy is “Allow scheduling.” If this is off, users assigned the policy won’t be able to schedule live events. Guests can’t organize or produce live events, but they can be a presenter at an event (a feature added in January 2020).

Inviting Your Audience

After setting permissions for a live event, the next screen (Figure 4) summarizes the event settings. Make sure that the settings are right because you won’t be able to change them once the event starts.

The important thing to note here is that you must take an extra step to distribute an invitation to attract an audience. This applies even if you explicitly limit permissions to attend the event to a selected set of people.

The right way to invite your audience is to click Get attendee link to copy the event link to the clipboard. Then paste the link into a regular calendar invitation sent to your intended audience. Don’t use a calendar invitation to a Teams meeting. The reason is simple: sending the link in a regular meeting avoids any clash with the meeting information inserted in an invitation created for a Teams meeting. Presenters receive a calendar invitation automatically which contains the special presenter link to allow them to present.

In a Live Event

Unlike regular meetings, where everyone can speak, share their video feed, and chat, only people assigned the producer, organizer, and presenter roles can speak, present information, and be seen during live events. Attendees can ask questions, but only through a moderated Q&A facility, and they can watch the recording of the live event later.

Figure 5 shows what a producer sees during a live event run from a PC’s webcam. A PowerPoint presentation is being lined up to be broadcast while the current feed is from the webcam. It’s very simple to switch from the webcam to the presentation using the Send live button.

Producers and presenters must use the Teams desktop client and must switch into the tenant hosting the event. This seems obvious, but guests you invite to present might have to be warned to switch beforehand (a 15-minute reminder email normally does the trick). If guests don’t switch into the hosting tenant, they will join as an attendee and won’t be able to present. Attendees can join using any Teams client.

Running Smooth Events

Before an event, it’s wise to do a run-through with all presenters to review the material to be used to ensure that everyone knows what will happen, the running order, and their part. A dress rehearsal makes it less likely that awkward transitions will happen and improves the quality of delivery. It will also accustom presenters to the delay between them speaking and attendees hearing.

Just before the event starts, put up a holding screen and some music to inform attendees that the event will start soon. The music allows people to test their speakers and make sure that everything’s working properly before the presentation starts. Meanwhile, the event organizer can check that all presenters have joined and are ready to go. It’s better to pause until everyone is ready to run a professional event than create the impression of amateur night at the theater.

During the event, have someone assigned to monitor attendee questions and comments to make sure that important issues are addressed by presenters either during the main presentation or in a Q&A session at the end. The monitor can also have a screen open as an attendee to keep an eye on what attendees see and hear.

After the event is over, organizers can download information about who attended the meeting and how long their participation lasted.

Live Events Have Higher Limits

Because attendees have limited functionality in live events, the number of participants is much higher (10,000) than for normal Teams meetings (250). Live events are recorded and can be accessed by the audience for up to 180 days after the event using DVR-type controls, which makes it convenient for people to replay an event later and listen to specific parts.

Event organizers can download the recording and upload it to Stream if they want the recording to be available for longer than 180 days.

Note: To help organizations run events during the Covid-19 pandemic, Microsoft has temporarily increased the limits for Live Events as follows:

• Maximum attendees: 20,000 (from 10,000)
• Maximum length of event: 16 hours (from 4 hours)
• Maximum number concurrent of events per tenant: 50 (from 15).

The temporary limits apply until October 1, 2020.

Largescale Live Events

Largescale live events which need output of the highest quality are often carefully-planned productions created with studio-quality recording, camera, and broadcast facilities. These events often involve external encoder software to connect to production equipment. Chapter 16 explains how to produce events of this nature.

You don’t need studio conditions to run a live event. Anyone equipped with a PC and webcam can create and run a live event. These events, called “produced with Teams,” are limited in terms of the video quality and perhaps the kind of information (like multiple video feeds) presented during the broadcast, but the output is more than good enough for many topics.

Using Live Events

Live events aren’t suitable for most Teams meetings. They’re designed for a specific scenario when there will be a limited number of presenters who share well-structured information that’s prepared in advance. You can certainly use a regular Teams meeting to address the same audience, but the extra control (and lack of distraction) available in Live Events make them a good choice when you need to broadcast information to non-participatory audiences.

For more information about running Teams Live Events, especially the largescale variety, look no further than Chapter 16 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Here’s my quick video review of the Plenom Busylight. It’s a small LED light that plugs into a USB port on your computer and changes color to reflect your presence status in Teams, Skype, Zoom, Jabber, or several other UC clients.

The executive summary: great device, well worth US$50 or so to help communicate your presence status to the partners, spouses, small children, and passers-by who may be in, around, or near your working-under-quarantine location.

Now, a couple of production notes. I wanted to record the video using my Logitech desktop webcam. It’s a C920, by no means the latest and greatest, but I didn’t want to fool around with finding a mount or tripod for my iPhone. My first thought was to use TechSmith’s Camtasia because it’s usually my go-to Windows tool for video work. I didn’t have it installed, though, so a little rummaging around led me to Logitech Capture, a surprisingly nice free utility that allows you to capture video from Logitech desktop webcams. It includes basic composition and exposure controls and the ability to simultaneously record with two cameras (which I didn’t test). For free, I was delighted with it; it did exactly what I wanted done with a very small learning curve. Pancake the cat, on the other hand, remains undecided.

Writing about a USB light doesn’t seem like the kind of thing serious book publishing people like the Office 365 for IT Pros team should be doing. But we have a lighthearted side too…

Stream Storage and Teams

Microsoft allocates each Office 365 tenant a base 500 GB of Stream storage plus 0.5 GB for every licensed account (excluding users with frontline licenses, like F1). The storage is consumed by videos uploaded to Stream. Teams usage due has recently experienced a massive upswing due to more people working from home. Many in-person meetings have been replaced by Teams meetings. Being able to record Teams meetings is a popular feature because it allows people who can’t attend the meeting to catch up afterwards. To generate a Teams meeting recording, a bot attends the meeting and automatically uploads the recording to Stream for processing once the meeting is over.

Given the way Teams uses Stream to store recordings, it’s reasonable to ask how much storage is consumed by these files. In the past, I’ve seen guidance of 2 MB/minute for medium-definition videos uploaded to Stream, but nothing about Teams recordings.

Stream Video Definitions

When it processes an uploaded video, Teams creates several versions of the video with different renditions or bitrates. When Stream plays a video back, it chooses the best possible definition. You can see the available definitions for a video using the settings (cogwheel) menu during playback (Figure 1).

Storage for Teams Meetings

To understand the storage used for Teams meeting recordings, I took nine recordings from the recent MVP Summit, which was originally intended to be an in-person event. Due to the Covid-19 situation, Microsoft decided to run the summit as an online event and use a mixture of Teams meetings and Live Events for the sessions. Although I missed the opportunity for offline chats with Microsoft engineers, Teams worked well as the foundation for an online conference.

Each recording was for a scheduled 50-minute meeting and featured a mixture of presentations, demos, and discussions involving up to 250 people (the current maximum for a Teams meeting). The meetings were recorded at 1080p (see note below). I consider these recordings to be representative sample of what an enterprise tenant might generate for their meetings. Table 1 lists the length of each meeting in minutes (decimal notation) and the size of the recording.

Table 1: Stream recording file sizes

Overall, the average is about 7.65 MB storage consumed per minute of a Teams meeting. Your mileage might vary, but this is probably a good figure for planning purposes. A 1,000-user tenant has a 1,000 GB storage quota for Stream. A quick calculation equates to about 2,230 hours of Teams meeting recordings. Given the number of corporate meetings that take place, this isn’t many hours…

Impact of Teams Recordings on Office 365

According to Microsoft, Teams users have recently generated 900 million meeting and calling minutes daily. If these minutes were all meetings and all recorded, they would consume 6,570.57 TB of Stream (Azure) storage at 1080p. Of course, many of these minutes are 1×1 or group calls and not all meetings are recorded, but consuming storage at even 2,000 TB/day is quite a rate.

Reducing the definition eases the processing load and reduces the storage needed, so it’s easy to see why Microsoft reduced the definition for Teams meeting recordings to 720p among other steps to reduce the load on the Office 365 infrastructure. It’s likely that Microsoft will increase the definition of Teams meeting recordings back to 1080p once the current strain on the Office 365 infrastructure eases.

How Much Storage is My Tenant Using?

Given that Teams meeting recordings can consume a large proportion of the assigned Stream storage quota, it seems important to understand what storage is being used and what’s consuming the storage. After all, you don’t want to be forced to buy added storage for Stream at $100/month per 500 GB unless absolutely necessary.

The problem is that Stream isn’t very good in terms of analytics. Stream administrators can view the current consumption (Figure 2), but there’s no easy way of finding out the size of each video. Stream doesn’t support the Graph reporting API like other Office 365 workloads like Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business do.

Stream and the Office 365 Audit Log

Maybe the Office 365 audit log can help? Well, you can certainly find events for when Stream uploads and processes videos, but the events logged don’t tell you anything about the file sizes. For instance, if we run some code to find and analyze upload events in the audit log, we can find who uploaded videos, but not much else (Figure 3).

$StartDate = (Get-Date).AddDays(-90); $EndDate = (Get-Date) 
$Records = (Search-UnifiedAuditLog -Operations StreamInvokeVideoUpload -StartDate $StartDate -EndDate $EndDate -ResultSize 2000)
If ($Records.Count -eq 0) {
    Write-Host "No audit records for Stream video uploads found." }
Else {
    Write-Host "Processing" $Records.Count "audit records..."
    $Report = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new() # Create output file for report
    # Scan each audit record to extract information
    ForEach ($Rec in $Records) {
      $AuditData = ConvertFrom-Json $Rec.Auditdata
        $ReportLine = [PSCustomObject] @{
           TimeStamp = Get-Date($AuditData.CreationTime) -format g
           User      = $AuditData.UserId
           Action    = $AuditData.Operation
           VideoURL  = $AuditData.ResourceURL
           VideoName = $AuditData.ResourceTitle }
      $Report.Add($ReportLine) } }
$Report | Sort {$_.TimeStamp -as [DateTime]} -Unique -Descending | Out-GridView

One interesting thing seen in the audit records is that videos uploaded from mobile devices don’t insert the video name in the audit record. That’s not a good thing.

Microsoft Needs to Deliver Stream Analytics

The current state of Stream analytics within Office 365 might have been satisfactory before the explosion of Teams meeting recordings. It isn’t now. Microsoft needs to make it possible for tenant administrators to find out how Stream storage is consumed or provide increased base storage. After all, they want all your data to be in the cloud, don’t they?

This topic is the kind of thing the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team thinks about all the time. The outcome mightn’t end up as more than a sentence or two in the book, but it’s nice to do the research to back up what we say.

Tracking Developments in Forms and Stream

It’s hard to stay up to date with everything that happens inside Office 365, especially when Microsoft doesn’t tell tenants about new features through the Office 365 Message Center and announcements are scattered across myriad blogs in the Microsoft Technical Community.

Which brings us to a nice change in Microsoft Forms disclosed in a recent post in the Microsoft Stream blog. I hadn’t realized that you can add media to questions in a form, but as it turns out, you can now add an image or a video to a question (but not both in the same question). The idea is to give respondents additional context for questions which might be complex. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words comes to mind.

Adding Media to a Question

To add media to a question, open a form and select the question. The Insert Media button is found to the right-hand side of the question title.

If you opt to add a picture, you can upload an image file from your workstation, your OneDrive for Business account, or find one on the internet using a Bing search. Videos can be selected from YouTube or Stream, with the caveat that Stream videos are only accessible to users within an Office 365 tenant because Stream doesn’t currently support guest user access.

Figure 1 shows how adding an image or video to a question can give more information to respondents about the questions they are asked to answer.

As with anything to do with images or videos, please make sure that the use of an image or video in a form respects copyright. You wouldn’t like to be sued!

Admin Control

The ability to add images (from Bing) and videos (from YouTube) is controlled in the Microsoft Forms section of Settings in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. If you disable YouTube videos, Forms replaces the embedded video with a link to take the reader to YouTube.

Forms isn’t covered in the main Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, but you can find some great content about Forms in Chapter 9 of the companion volume, available to all subscribers.

Scaling Challenges For Teams as More People Work from Home

Microsoft’s cloud Office infrastructure has had some recent challenges as it scaled up to deal with the upsurge in demand from both the enterprise and education sectors as people moved out of offices and classrooms to work from home due to the Covid-19 virus. Things will settle down as the adjustments Microsoft is making take effect and new hardware comes online. At least, that’s the plan.

The interesting thing is how many Office 365 tenants are discovering that Teams is a solution to help people work from home. The demand for advice and guidance is staggering, perhaps because companies have accelerated their plans to deploy solutions like Teams, especially for audio and video conferencing.

Bringing People Together to Discuss Best Practice

AvePoint’s avuncular Chief Marketing Officer, Dux Raymond Sy, hosted a impromptu Teams call on March 18 to discuss “How to Ensure the Best Office 365 Remote Work Experience.” Appropriately, the webinar used a Teams video call, with a backup live stream to LinkedIn to ensure that people could connect when Teams hit its meeting participant limit of 250. Above this, you can use Teams Live Events, which scale up to 10,000 attendees, but usually need more preparation and perhaps post-processing.

The call started with a discussion about making sure that company networks can cope with the shift to home working in conjunction with Office 365. If you’re involved in network planning, make sure that you this post by Microsoft’s Paul Collinge and use it as a checklist to validate that your network is prepared.

If you haven’t already done so, consider using conditional access policies to ensure that only authorized people can connect to your Office 365 tenant.

Mastering Teams for Home Working

From an administration perspective, it’s unwise to rush into a deployment of Teams without taking some time to think things through. Time is a scarce commodity when people want things done now (or preferably, yesterday), but you can work through the points listed in this article to figure out how your deployment should proceed. Remember that it’s easier to release some controls and allow people to do more than it is to restrict them once a deployment is operational.

Setting Teams Up for Meetings

Online meetings are the big focus area right now because they replace the face to face gatherings people have in offices. On a personal level, your home network needs to cope with the bandwidth and latency demands of Teams. I’ve had quite a few reports of people needing to invest in mesh networks to ensure that enough bandwidth is delivered to where they want to work in a house.

To make sure your network can cope, make a test call to ensure that you can connect to Teams and participate in audio and video meetings. If bandwidth is scarce, you can connect with just audio, but it’s best when everyone’s remote if you enable your PC’s camera and use video. This normally results in better participation in the meeting.

With video enabled, make sure you turn background blur on as no-one is interested in seeing your immediate surroundings. At the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft discussed the ability to replace background blur with customized background images. The feature is now available, including the ability to upload and use custom images for meeting backgrounds. (Figure 1).

Other points of Teams meeting etiquette include:

• Be on time for meetings.
• Start the meeting with all microphones muted and keep them muted unless someone needs to speak. In addition, silence phones. No one wants to hear calls coming in during the meeting.
• Set ground rules for asking questions during presentations. Some people like to be asked while they are speaking, others prefer questions to be kept to the end of the meeting.
• Use chat to capture questions and post links to pages relevant to discussions. Apart from anything else, this helps presenters and attendees track any action items or open questions. It also removes the need to interrupt a presentation.
• Ask before recording. You never know when someone has a problem with recording a meeting and you should ask before proceeding.

Taking Care of Meeting Recordings

Unless prohibited by a Teams meeting policy, Any tenant user who attends a meeting can start or stop recording to capture the full audio and video stream of the meeting plus chats and screen sharing activity. The recording is later stored in Stream and can be viewed and shared from there.

Stream doesn’t support guest user access, so you can’t share recordings with people outside the organization unless you download the MP4 file and put it on an external-facing service, like a SharePoint Online site. For example, AvePoint posted a recording of yesterday’s call on LinkedIn.

The recording for a Teams meeting can be a maximum of four hours long, after which Teams stops the recording automatically. It’s common to find that everyone leaves a meeting, and no one remembers to stop the recording. When this happens, you can trim the recording to remove the unwanted piece at the end. It’s best when the meeting organizer takes the responsibility to start and stop the recording and make the recording available afterwards (meeting attendees have automatic access).

Before sharing a recording widely, it’s a good idea for the organizer to review the automatic transcript generated by Stream from the audio (not all languages are supported. The transcript is made up of captions created for every few seconds. Like any automatic transcription software, Stream can produce some absolutely wonderful interpretations of what people say, not all of which are quite what they intend to get across. You can edit the captions to correct errors and to make sure that the correct message is passed.

Teams Conversations

I think most people will find Teams channel conversations and personal chats easy to get used to. After all, chat applications work much the same and if you’re used to something like Facebook or Slack, you’ll know what to do with Teams.

I encourage new Teams users to embrace some basic points of etiquette to make their conversations smoother. For instance:

• Always start a new topic with a Subject.
• Don’t reply to a topic by starting a new conversation.
• Don’t use @Team or @Channel mentions unless you want lots of people to be notified.
• Use the important mark to highlight critical information.
• Use announcements for announcements, not for every new topic.
• Don’t post private information to channels. Use personal chats instead.
• Use reactions (likes) instead of replies when all you want to do is agree with a point.

Some up-front coaching for users will make Teams conversations more productive and easier to navigate. If you don’t help people to use the technology effectively, the Teams activity feed will rapidly become as cluttered and unwieldly as any out-of-control inbox.

Don’t Forget Documents

If your organization still uses on-premises file servers to hold documents, it’s time to migrate that information to SharePoint Online and help users understand how to access and work with document libraries efficiently. They’ll also need some coaching to master OneDrive for Business and the OneDrive sync client, which helps people to work from home during transient network outages. If you’re concerned about data leakage, consider protecting SharePoint and OneDrive documents with Office 365 sensitivity labels and Office 365 data loss prevention policies together with the sensitive by default setting for new files.

Need more information to plan and manage your deployment of Teams alongside the rest of Office 365? Look no further than a subscription to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Receive monthly updates to ensure you remain up to date with the latest developments.

Stream Videos to Mobile Devices

Microsoft Stream has mobile clients for iOS and Android. In many ways, mobile devices are the natural way to consume videos, which is why people do so with gusto using apps like Facebook and Instagram. As a fully paid-up member of the Grumpy Old Men club, the thought of using the Stream mobile app to access videos such as the recordings of Teams meetings isn’t the first thing on my mind. However, the experience is highly usable and useful with features to find and play videos, like videos and make (rude) comments, edit content, and download videos for offline access.

The automatic transcript generated by Stream for a video is available (Figure 1) when watching videos (and is sometimes helpful), but you can’t use Stream face recognition to find people.

Moving On From Consumption

A mobile device is a good way to consume videos, but being able to use the cameras and microphones in mobile devices to create content is increasingly important, even in the corporate world. Instead of writing a trip report, users can tape a quick video to inform co-workers about a topic.

The video creation features available in the Stream mobile app include:

• Swap between the available cameras on the device. The default camera selected for a new video is rear-facing, but you’ll probably want to use the front-facing camera for in-person shots.
• Record multiple clips before uploading the video to Stream. When all the clips are recorded, you can drag and drop them into the order you want the clips to appear in the video.
• Include photos stored on the device in a clip. For example, you could take a picture of a new product and tape a commentary for the picture.
• Annotate (draw), add emojis, or apply filters to a clip.
• Trim clips by removing content from the front or end of a video.

For example, let’s say that I want to tape a quick report about the use of FIDO2 keys for Azure Active Directory authentication, I might start with a captioned introduction using some text overlaid on a suitable background (Figure 2).

I might then tape some other clips to fill out the report, potentially including some shots of me talking to camera, and then decide what order the clips should go (two clips are shown in Figure 2) by dragging each clip into the right order. When everything’s ready, the Upload button starts the process of moving the video from the device to Stream (Figure 3).

The next screen allows the video creator to select options like sharing and to complete the publication process. The video is uploaded to Stream, which processes it to add automatic captioning (but only if you mark the video with one of the supported languages. The text used in the mobile client says that Stream only supports English and Spanish, but Microsoft’s documentation mentions eight languages. I have not tried taping a video in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, or Spanish.

Viewing Mobile Content

Mobile video content has its limitations. The sound quality might not be great unless you use an external microphone and the candy bar format of many mobile screens creates an elongated viewing experience (Figure 4).

In most cases, unless the sound is inaudible, these points won’t matter to viewers. The content is the sole concern, and it’s better to capture something on a mobile device than to miss the opportunity just because a film crew complete with cameras and heavy-duty sound equipment are unavailable.

The Office 365 for IT Pros team revisits chapters on a regular basis to make sure that we’re not missing anything. Our little foray into the world of mobile device video production is a result of reviewing the chapter on Stream. It’s the constant revision of our content that makes the eBook come alive.

Location of Stream Data Could Cause Data Sovereignty Issue

Office 365 Notification MC200501 published on January 17, 2020 gave some important information for tenants who cannot currently use the facility to record Teams meetings and store the recordings in Stream because the Teams and Stream services are not co-located in the tenant’s Office 365 datacenter region.

Update (May 26): Microsoft posted Office 365 notification MC214327 to advise about the new AllowRecordingStorageOutsideRegion setting in Teams meeting policies to control how Teams stores its meeting recordings in Stream. The new setting rolls out at the end of June and should be deployed worldwide by mid-July.

Update (Sept 23): Office 365 notification MC222640 of 23 September announces that tenants will be able to switch recordings of Teams meetings processed by Stream to be stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Among other benefits, this means that recordings will be stored in the same datacenter region as the video owner.

Teams Meeting Policy Settings

Apart from having licenses for Office 365 and Stream, the recording of Teams calls and meetings is controlled by the Allow cloud recording setting (AllowCloudRecording in PowerShell) in Teams meeting policies assigned to user accounts. If the policy setting is On (the default), meeting participants can initiate recordings. The sole caveat is that the meeting organizer (the account which created the meeting) must also be able to record meetings. Guest users in the tenant or federated and anonymous participants can’t record meetings because they don’t have the necessary licenses.

Allow transcription (AllowTranscription in PowerShell) is another important setting in the Teams meeting policy. If you allow users to record meetings, you should allow Stream to generate automatic transcripts for the meetings as well. Originally, Stream could only generate transcripts in English and Spanish, but Microsoft recently increased the number of languages to include Chinese, Japanese, French, and German.

Co-location of Teams and Stream

Up to now, tenants have only been able to store recordings of Teams meetings in Stream when the Teams and Stream services are co-located in the same Office 365 datacenter region. The idea is that tenants probably want to keep all their data in the same Office 365 region, especially if they use one of the country-level regions deployed to satisfy customer requirements for data sovereignty.

To check where a tenant’s Teams service is located, check the Data location under Settings in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (Figure 1)

To check the location for Stream, open the app, click the question mark in the menu bar, and select the About Microsoft Stream link (Figure 2)

In this case, both services are hosted in the European Union datacenter region, so the tenant has always been able to store recordings of Teams meetings in Stream. This is the situation for tenants in the U.S., European Union, Asia Pacific, Australia, India, United Kingdom, Canada, and GCC regions. Microsoft plans to deploy Stream in the sovereign (China and Germany), GCC-high, and other “go local” country-level regions in the future. According to Office 365 notification MC214327, Stream will be available in Japan, Norway, France, UAE, Singapore, South Korea, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden by the end of 2020.

Storing Teams Meeting Recordings Outside Your Region

Teams meeting recordings are currently disabled when Stream is not co-located with Teams. The new AllowRecordingStorageOutsideRegion setting is set to False in all Teams meeting policies to ensure that current behavior continues. After the change is rolled out, you’ll be able to make a tenant-wide change in the Teams admin center to update the setting to True. Teams will then be able to use Stream services outside your country running in the nearest geographic datacenter region to store videos for call and meeting recordings. For example, if your tenant belongs to the French Office 365 region, the recordings will be stored by Stream in the European Union region. Put another way, the recordings will physically reside in Ireland, Finland, Austria, or the Netherlands because that’s where the Office 365 datacenters are for the European Union region. The change does not affect the recording of Teams Live Events.

Microsoft stresses that if a tenant chooses to store Teams call and meeting recordings outside their local region, they will not be able to transfer recordings once Stream begins operates in the local region. For example, if a French tenant decides to use Stream in the EMEA region, the recordings stored there will not be transferred to Stream running in the French datacenter when that service starts later in 2020. However, new recordings taken after Stream starts in France will be stored in France.

Enabling Teams Recording for All

After the change is deployed, tenants will have to choose to allow users to record Teams calls and meetings or change the Teams meeting policy to block recordings. If your organization is not concerned about data sovereignty, this change offers the chance to use Teams meeting recording without having to wait for local deployment of Stream, which could be good news for some organizations.

Controlling Who Can Record Teams Calls and Meetings

For those who don’t want to allow recordings, the easiest approach is to block recordings by setting Allow cloud recording to Off in the global Teams meeting policy.

If you want to allow some users to record meetings, create a new Teams meeting policy with the setting On and then assign that policy to the accounts you want to record meetings. You can assign the policy to accounts in the Teams Admin Center or by running the PowerShell Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet. For instance, this code assigns a specific Teams meeting policy to a set of mailboxes selected based on a value stored in their CustomAttribute1 property:

$Mbx = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -Filter {CustomAttribute1 -eq "Meetings"}        
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
      Try {
       Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -PolicyName "Allow meeting recording" -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName
       Write-Host $M.DisplayName "is allowed to record Teams meetings" }
      Catch {
        Write-Host "Problem occurred when assigning the Allow meeting recording policy to" $M.DisplayName } }

Ask Before Proceeding

But before anyone affected by this change takes the plunge and starts recording, it would be wise to seek advice about whether data sovereignty should include the recordings of Teams meetings. If yes, you should continue to block Teams meeting recording until Microsoft deploys Stream in the local datacenter. If not, happy recording!

Keeping up with small but important changes like this can be terribly time-consuming. We do it without breaking sweat because we’ve been tracking Office 365 for years. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and benefit from our insight.

Automatic Migration to Stream on March 1 2020

Microsoft launched Stream, its new video streaming service, on June 20, 2017. During its preview, Microsoft positioned Stream as a platform for both consumers and businesses, but when it attained general availability, Stream was on target to be the future video service for Office 365 and consumer access was no longer in scope.

Since then, Stream has matured and added new features like video trimming, but the migration from Office 365 Video has not been fast. The long-drawn out transition is now coming to an end. On December 19, Microsoft published a blog to announce the final steps in the process. Office 365 Video is no longer available to new tenants and has been disabled for any tenants who never uploaded content to the service.

Moving Office 365 Video to Stream

The Office 365 Video portal was one of the next-generation portals developed by Microsoft in the 2014-16 timeframe to leverage SharePoint Online. In fact, video was the only portal to reach prime time. Metadata and original content are stored in SharePoint Online, where channels have their own sites, while encoded video is stored and served from Azure Media Services.

Stream doesn’t use SharePoint Online at all but does store its content in Azure Media Services. The migration therefore needs to transfer data from SharePoint to Azure and then remove the migrated sites. It doesn’t sound as if this should be too difficult, but you can’t be too careful with corporate content. This, and the need to make sure that Stream offers features needed by Office 365 tenants, is likely what has delayed the migration for some tenants. On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that many tenants (including my own) have moved to Stream successfully over the past few months.

To help convince tenants to migrate, Microsoft points out that Stream offers many features not found in Office 365 Video (extracted from this page).

• Office 365 Groups support, allowing a video library for every Office 365 Group
• Permissions at the video level
• Sub-channels within a group
• Videos may appear in multiple channels
• Personal watch list to get back to videos later
• Comments and likes directly on the video
• Rich video description, including links directly to times within a video
• Automatic closed caption based on what’s spoken in the video
• Deep search of what’s spoken in the video
• Face detection, allowing exploring a video by where a face appears
• Live events
• Support for Hive (P2P), Kollective (P2P), and Ramp (cache proxy and multicast) as eCDN providers
• Microsoft Teams meeting recordings
• Stream mobile app on iOS and Android with offline playback

Timelines

If your tenant hasn’t yet moved video content to Stream, you need to note some important dates:

• Now: Decide if you can migrate or need to delay. If you decide to delay, you must make that decision by March 1, 2020. To delay, follow the posted instructions.
• March 1, 2020: Automatic migrations begin for tenants who opt not to delay.
• April 1, 2020: The Office 365 Video iOS app is retired.
• March 1, 2021: Last phase of migration starts for tenants who opted to delay (as long as possible).
• March 1, 2022: Redirection of old Office 365 Video links to Stream halts.

The biggest issue is to need to decide to delay or go ahead with the migration before March. The longest possible delay is one more year, so this should be a real wake-up call to remove any obstacles that might be blocking your tenant’s migration. Some tenants and ISVs customized Office 365 Video to enhance or add to functionality and these are likely to be the last to move.

GCC and Sovereign Clouds

These dates apply to commercial Office 365 tenants, but not Government Cloud (GCC) or sovereign cloud tenants. Microsoft will update GCC tenants about migration dates in early 2020 while the migration from Office 365 Video in the Germany and China sovereign datacenter regions is dependent on the availability of Stream services in those regions.

Stream is covered in Chapter 14 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. It’s an evolving application, so we have new Stream content to cover on a regular basis.

Clean Up the Start and End of Stream Videos

Often videos have some extraneous material at the start and finish. This is especially true of recordings of Teams meetings or self-produced videos where some time is consumed before the content starts to get things ready, check microphones, and so on. To improve the quality of a video stored in Microsoft Stream, you can remove content from the start or end of the file using the trim function in the […] menu (Figure 1). Stream currently doesn’t offer a method to remove information from the middle of videos.

Being able to trim videos is a feature commonly found in other video services (like YouTube or Facebook Live). Think of trimming as a form of primitive editing to improve the appearance of videos captured through informal sources.

Trim Points

When you trim a video, Stream loads a timeline of the content. You can then move two “trim points” by dragging them to where you want the video to start and end. When you’re happy that the content is right, click Apply (Figure 2).

Stream Trims in the Background

After you confirm that the trim should proceed, Stream processes the file in the background to permanently remove content up to the start trim point and from the end trim point. There’s no recovery from this operation; once Stream completes processing the video, a new file trimmed to the selected points replaces the old video and the trimmed content is irrecoverable (Figure 3). For this reason, it is wise to download a copy of a video before making any changes.

While trimming proceeds, users see that the video is being changed. They can refresh the page to see if the new version is available (Figure 4) or keep on watching the old version. Remember, it’s only the start and end of the video that changes, so the content in the middle stays the same.

Any Owner Can Trim

Anyone with owner access (for instance, because they are a member of a group with owner access to the video) can trim a video. Stream doesn’t lock a video to stop multiple people selecting trim points but does when it is applying trims in the background (Figure 5). In other words, two people can’t trim a video at the same time.

Depending on the load on the service and the length of the video, trimming can take from a few minutes to an hour or so to finish, including the generation of new captions/transcript and timeline. When the new video is available, Stream highlights the fact that the file was updated. If you’ve linked a form to a video, you’ll have to update it after trimming.

According to Microsoft, the trim feature is now being rolled out across Office 365 and deployment should be complete soon.

Need more information about Stream and its relationship with the rest of Office 365? Read Chapter 14 in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook!

Office 365 Notification MC186719 appeared on July 29 (Office 365 Roadmap 53140). Normally Microsoft posts notifications a few weeks before a roll-out starts, but in this case they were a little earlier than usual. However, no harm done and now the Stream Recycle Bin (Figure 1) has turned up in the Office 365 for IT Pros tenant. The appearance of the Recycle Bin is useful because tenants are just commencing DIY migrations from Office 365 Video to Stream.

Thirty Days to Reconsider

The Stream Recycle Bin is very straightforward. Delete a video and it goes into the bin for 30 days. During this period, the video’s owner can access the video by opening the Recycle bin through the My Content menu. To restore the video to its original location (groups and channels) with its original permissions, click the restore video icon on the far right of the video’s listing (under Actions).

Once the 30 day retention period expires, a background job removes the video permanently and it is irrecoverable. Video owners can accelerate the process by clicking the Delete icon in the listing: this will remove the video immediately.

Stream Administrators Can Restore Any Deleted Video in a Tenant

Stream administrators also have access to the Recycle Bin where they’ll find any video deleted by any tenant user that hasn’t yet expired. An administrator can then restore or delete the video. MC186719 says that the Recycle Bin displays how much of the tenant’s Stream storage is consumed by videos in the bin. I don’t see this in my tenant, but perhaps it’s a feature that’s still being deployed.

Need more information about Stream? We have a full chapter covering Stream in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

New Meetings Tab Shows Up in Stream

Office 365 Notification MC189279 brings the happy news that those of us who record meetings in Teams will find it easier to locate the recordings when they arrive in Stream. A new Meetings option has been added to the My Content menu; the same filter is applied using the Meetings tab in the Stream menu bar (Figure 1). You’ll be able to find recordings that are published or draft (still need some work done before publication).

This fulfills the promise of Office 365 Roadmap item 54528 to the delight of Office 365 tenants who began to see the new feature in late August 2019. The roll-out is due to be complete worldwide by the end of September 2019.

Recording Meetings

Not everyone likes the idea of recording a meeting. To make sure that everyone knows what’s happening and has an opportunity to leave the meeting if they don’t want to be recorded, when someone turns on recording of a Teams meeting, participants see a warning banner to tell them that everything they say will be recorded.

After the meeting finishes, Teams has the recording processed by Azure Media Services and stores the output as a video file in Stream. The person who started the recording is the owner of the video. All other participants in the meeting can view the video.

In addition to capturing a video of the meeting, voice contributions are transcribed when Stream generates an automatic transcript of a meeting (one of Stream’s intelligent features). In fact, the output isn’t a transcript as would be generally known. A Stream transcript is composed of all the captions generated when Stream processes a video file. It’s not possible to print off a complete transcript or even the individual captions unless you copy and paste the captions into a file. The owners of a video can correct the captions once Stream is finished – you should do this to correct some of the howlers that can creep in through automatic transcription.

Yes, we cover Stream in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. In fact, we have a complete chapter to explain what’s going on inside the Office 365 enterprise video portal.

Add a Quiz or Survey to Track Viewer Interest

If you haven’t looked at Microsoft Stream for a while, you might have missed the introduction of the Interactivity tab, which was introduced to the product in early 2019. As the word implies, the tab exists as an entry point to interaction between the people who own video content and those who watch or consume the content. By adding a quiz, survey, or poll to a video, you drive viewer interest in the content and have the chance to collect information based on what they just watched.

In fact, because each form is tied to a certain point in the video timeline, you can have multiple forms exposed at different parts of a video. You can see how this would be valuable in learning situations (to measure how well the watcher understands the material being discussed) or corporate video portal (to gather feedback from employees about new programs or other initiatives).

It’s All Forms for Now

Right now, Microsoft Forms is the only application you can link to the Interactivity tab, but it’s a useful one because it illustrates how useful the concept is. It’s also another nice example of how Microsoft adds value to Office 365 by linking different components together in a way that’s simply impossible on-premises.

Take the video I recorded with Paul Thurrott in Washington DC recently. During the discussion, we talk about whether Teams is the new Outlook. Here’s how we could add a poll to the video to see if viewers agree with the assertion. First, go to Microsoft Forms and create a simple form. Figure 1 is really simple – just one question to answer (but that’s OK, because viewers don’t want their watching disturbed by lots of questions).

Using the Interactivity Tab

Use the Send button in Forms to generate a URL that can be used for sharing. It will be something like:

Go to Stream and open the video you want to use with the form. Find the best point in the video to display the form (use one of those pregnant pauses that often occur in discussions) and note the timeline data (in minutes and seconds, like 06:30 for six minutes and 30 seconds into the video). Remember that you can link several forms to a video so it’s important not to select the same time for multiple forms and to space the forms out within the video.

Now click the Interactivity tab and then Add New. Paste the URL of the form, give the form a name, and make sure that the timeline point is correct. Then click Add to timeline to create the link between the form and video.

Displaying a Form in a Stream Video

With the link in place, when Stream reaches the set point in the timeline while playing the video, it pauses playback and invokes the URL for the form. The form displays in the frame used for video playback (Figure 3). The user can interact with the form and submit it for processing before resuming video playback.

Generally, everything works nicely (although I’ve seen a few warnings that my changes will be lost when I leave the site; I assume the warning comes from Forms, but it doesn’t seem to affect anything).

Stream is covered in the main book of Office 365 for IT Pros. We cover Forms in the companion volume.

Stream and Public Access

Following my post about the Petri videos taped in Washington DC last week, a reader asked me why we didn’t post the videos on Microsoft Stream. The reason is simple: the Office 365 roadmap includes a work item (2778) to support Public anonymous external video sharing that will allow Stream videos to be marked for public access and embedded in a web site. Today, that’s not possible and viewers need Office 365 licenses to access Stream content.

Hopefully, Microsoft will deliver external access by the end of 2019 as the roadmap indicates. Apart from making Stream much more useful as a platform for corporate video communications (internal and external), it could help ease the issues guest accounts have viewing Stream content in Teams, Outlook Groups, and Planner.

Transcribing Human Conversations

The question prompted me to take a fresh look at Stream video processing, especially some of the advanced features like face recognition and automatic transcripts. I uploaded the 1.2 GB MP4 file for the conversation between Paul Thurrott and myself about Outlook, Teams, and the meaning of life.

If a video’s language is English or Spanish, Stream processes automatic captions after a video has completed uploading. The captions are then concatenated to form a transcript. The process happens faster than I remember and the transcript itself seems to be more accurate. In many cases, the problems visible in the transcript were due to the humans when we didn’t express thoughts clearly or mumbled. Obviously Microsoft has been working hard in this area to improve the quality of automatic transcription, which wasn’t great when they first launched Stream in 2017. Figure 1 shows the video playing. You can see the transcript in a scrolling pane on the right-hand side.

Editing a Stream Transcript

In most cases, the transcript serves as an adequate record of what was said, but if necessary the video owner (the person who uploads it to Stream) can edit the transcript to correct the text (Figure 2). Notice that the transcript is broken up into chunks of text that are tied to timestamps in the video (the captions). The transcript intermingles contributions from different speakers. For instance, the text I’m editing completes a remark by Paul with “Thank you” and then runs on to my brilliant response starting with “Yeah, well.” It would be nice if you could edit the transcript more comprehensively to separate out what each speaker says more obviously, but that might break the connection with the video timestamps.

Searching Transcripts

Apart from making transcripts look better, another good reason for editing transcripts to correct errors and improve the clarity of communications is that Stream supports transcript search. Because it’s based on the captions used to create the transcripts, don’t expect a full-text search facility. Instead, by using simple search terms that are likely to be found in transcript chunks, you should get reasonable results. Figure 3 is an example where we search Stream for “Office 365.” Notice that Stream tells you where in the video the transcript identifies the search term. These are clickable links that open the video and take you to the place in the video where the search term was found.

Transition from Office 365 Video

Stream is obviously improving but the migration from the older Office 365 Video portal has been slow. The latest (this month) report from Microsoft says that we are now in Phase 1:

Phase 1 – Tenant Admin Opt-in (started rollout June 2019)
Open to customers in specific regions who are not using the Office 365 Video REST APIs, Office 365 integrations (Delve, SharePoint Home, SharePoint mobile, Enterprise Search), and are comfortable with other differences between Office 365 Video and Stream. See more details about the migration experience for this phase.

It would be nice to complete the process… except that my videos that are in the older video portal are now a tad old and some qualify for historic status!

For more information about Stream, read the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. In fact, we’ve just rewritten all our Stream content and will bring Stream back into the main book for the 2020 edition.

Intelligence for All

In the past, only users with Office 365 E5 licenses or the Stream Plan 2 add-on had access to the intelligent features for video processing such as:

• Speaker timelines that use facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a speaker in the recording.
• Speech-to-text and closed captions that capture the event in a readable form and make the content more accessible for everyone
• Transcript search and timecodes that let you quickly find moments that matter in a video.

At Ignite 2018, Microsoft said that these features would be coming to all Office 365 enterprise, education, and frontline users with availability “soon.” Now, as announced in Message Center update MC152814, the new features have started to roll out to tenants to be available to users with E1, E3, F1, A1, A3, Business Premium, Business Essentials, and Microsoft 365 Business licenses. Unless, that is, your tenant is based in one the the Office 365 sovereign clouds (like the U.S. Government “GCC” region or the German “Black Forest” region”). The new German general-purpose Office 365 region is included.

Once enabled, Stream applies the intelligent features automatically when it processes new videos, Older videos uploaded before tenants receive their upgrade will be reprocessed for speech-to-text closed captions and deep search.

Using Stream Intelligence

I like using Stream and take advantage of the intelligence built into the platform as much as I can. Sometimes, as I found after uploading a video podcast recorded at Ignite 2018, the transcript can be a bit obtuse, but it’s still better than not having a transcript. The video in question has another quirk in that Stream didn’t generate a speaker timeline based on facial recognition. I can’t work out why or how to force Stream to reprocess the video.

More Work for Stream

If you use Teams and record meetings, Teams places the recording (audio and video of whatever’s shared during the meeting) in Stream. The recording is only available to the meeting organizer until they update the permissions to make it available to whoever should share it, such as the meeting participants.

Where’s the Migration from Office 365 Video?

I’d be even happier if I could migrate my tenant’s content from Office 365 Video to Stream so that all my older videos could take advantage of the new features. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been pretty quiet on that point recently and I don’t quite know when the long-awaited migration will happen.

We cover Stream in Chapter 7 of the companion volume for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We could have put it in the main book, but that’s already 1,100 pages long. Too much content, too little space!

To Backup Or Not To Backup

I’ve noticed several backup vendors become very excited by the Microsoft Shared Responsibility model for cloud services (Figure 1), mostly because the belief exists that the model supports the need for backups. I’m not sure that this is the case. Like any generic model, interpretations vary with circumstances and it’s impossible to say that the model always applies in all circumstances.

Microsoft Service Agreements and Backups

Another Microsoft document often advanced in support for backups is the Services Agreement for Online Services. While undoubtedly true that the agreement mentions backups three times, two are in the context of closing an account and the need to copy data before closure. The other mention says, “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.” At first glance, that sounds conclusive. And then you realize that the recommendation is for Microsoft consumer online services like Outlook.com and OneDrive.com. We therefore conclude that Microsoft recommends consumers to backup their data, which is reasonable advice.

Challenges in Microsoft 365 for Backup Products

The equivalent service agreement document governing Microsoft 365 doesn’t mention backup at all. I think several reasons exist why this is so.

• Microsoft 365 applications include features like Exchange Online native data protection to ensure that data loss does not occur. Some other features, like retention policies and labels, depend on having appropriate licenses (Office 365 E3 and above), and can be used to ensure that important data cannot be removed.
• Although APIs exist to backup some Microsoft 365 apps, the APIs were never created to underpin cloud backup and recovery. For instance, Microsoft created Exchange Web Services (EWS) for programmatic access to mailbox data. EWS was never intended to stream large quantities of mailbox data across the internet.
• Even worse, backup APIs do not exist for the newer cloud-only services like Teams, Planner, Yammer, and Stream. Microsoft can’t recommend backups when no possibility exists to take backups. Some vendors attempt to workaround the lack of APIs by copying compliance records from Exchange Online. This is acceptable if you recognize that the records are incomplete and cannot be restored.
• Backup products often focus on workloads, like Exchange Online or SharePoint Online. This is old-school thinking firmly rooted in the world of on-premises deployments where workload-specific processing is the norm. In the cloud, apps intermingle in a way which doesn’t happen on-premises. This creates a difficulty in restoring data. To achieve a complete point-in-time restore for Teams, for instance, the restore process might have to deal with Teams channel conversations, chats, configuration data, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business documents, whiteboards, calendars, attendance reports for meetings, meeting notes, approvals, and a bunch of data belonging to first and third-party apps. Teams is the most complex of any Microsoft 365 app to backup in terms of the web of connections it uses, but it does illustrate the problem faced for restore operations.
• Given the amount of data generated by Microsoft 365 organizations, I wonder if it is possible to restore more than a few accounts should a problem occur. The value from a backup is often best seen in granular recovery operations when you need to restore just a few documents or a couple of mailboxes. Once numbers scale up, the sheer amount of data which needs to be restored creates a real challenge.

Of course, backup vendors do not acquaint potential customers with these inconvenient facts. Instead, too much focus is given to the potential dire consequences of something like a cyberattack (which has happened to Microsoft 365 tenants) without exploring the methods to resist attacks, like enabling multi-factor authentication for all users.

Not Against Backups

I am not against organizations subscribing to third-party backup solutions to protect their Microsoft 365 data. Backups have their place and can be very valuable if you understand the situation and can leverage backup technology to solve a problem for your company. Any considered decision which takes all the facts into account before settling on a course of action is goodness.

What I am against is the lack of honesty which often happens in conversations around the need for backup of Microsoft 365 data. Too much FUD, like the rogue administrator who removes a bunch of data, is used to create the case for backups. It would be better if backup ISVs argued their case based on fact rather than fear. I live in hope.

Last Updated: 2 April 2021

The topic of backups is covered in more detail in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We like to think we take a pragmatic and sensible approach to the topic.

Discussing the State of Office 365

At 9am last Friday, the last day of the Ignite conference in Orlando, Paul Robichaux and I got together with Greg Taylor to discuss various topics loosely related to Office 365 in the latest episode of Office 365 Exposed, a podcast that we tape on an irregular basis when we are in the same place together for more than a day or so. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and read Paul’s commentary on this episode on his blog.

Nine is a terribly early time to talk about anything, especially after being out late the night before at the conference’s attendee party at Universal Studios and then getting up early to fly in Paul’s Cessna over Orlando, so some of what we said might not make too much sense. At least, that was my conclusion after reading the transcript automatically generated by Stream when I uploaded the raw MP4 file given to us by the film crew a few minutes after we finished.

Video Transcripts

The idea behind automatic transcripts is that Stream is able to recognize words spoken on videos as it processes and publishes uploaded video content. Automatic speech recognition technology breaks the spoken word down into a series of captions that combine together to form the transcript. There’s a lot of heavy-duty technology here and only English and Spanish language videos are supported today.

But nice as it is to have an automatic transcript, the ability of the speech recognition engine to understand what is being said varies from very good to not so good. Take this interchange about the Teams background blur feature:

“you’d solve our resolve the full-grown blur yours as well but just enough“

“as an option to reverse that generative for way I’ve learned by interface“

“yeah, they’re nice I say that it that all actually that is a good point to make people aware of is”

Generating transcripts from videos is an advanced feature of Stream that’s part of Office 365 E5 (Stream Plan 2). And to be fair, it must be extraordinarily difficult to cope with three different accents (English, U.S., and Irish) from three grumpies, all of whom have no difficulty talking over each other.

In any case, you can edit the transcript to increase accuracy, and this is something that’s probably done by corporate marketing or internal communications people when important videos are posted to Stream for internal consumption. Fully correcting a transcript probably takes three times as long as a video, so you’d expect to spend at least two hours on this 43-minute extravaganza.

Meanwhile, the nice people at Practical365.com took the raw video and did a little editing to remove the bits before and after we taped the show and have posted the finished article for your viewing pleasure. The content didn’t improve, but perhaps you’ll be able to make more sense of what we said than Stream did.

We cover Stream in Chapter 7 of the Companion Volume for Office 365 for IT Pros. As Microsoft get through the migration of Office 365 Video to Stream, we might bring the topic back into the main book. Then again, we might not.