Digital asset management turns the corner
Video native on SharePoint
Video has been a major driver for the need to manage multimedia as it has become more popular and easier to create, but has been more difficult to manage than other formats. The large file size is one factor; however, more important is the need to impose an array of tags that describe the file. With a text file, a keyword search of the full text can reveal a lot, but with a video, findability has everything to do with metadata—who is in the video, what was the setting, time of day and predominant colors may all be elements across which a user would like to search. Many organizations fall short in organizing their video files and making them accessible.
Three different scenarios serve as the catalyst for a company to improve its capabilities, according to Stephen Blankenship, VP of product and operations at RAMP, which provides a variety of solutions for management of video. “One major impetus could be a steadily increasing volume of complaints about the inadequacy of managing video at work,” he says, “and the other is a mandate from someone in a C-level position who wants to be able to communicate easily by video. The third one is ?rare, but it does happen—an outright crisis that impairs a company’s ?ability to use video.”
Microsoft SharePoint is widely used as a content management system but was not built with rich media or video in mind. “It was a Microsoft document-focused system and basically still is,” Blankenship adds, “so it is not surprising that there are no video-specific capabilities.” To address that need, RAMP developed Video Verge, which brings video content into the SharePoint document-focused context. “Video Verge was built from the ground up on SharePoint using SharePoint metadata,” says Blankenship. “Where SharePoint does not provide a service, such as transcoding or transcription, we add a pipeline to provide that function. The video can be stored like any other content.”
Once the video is stored natively in SharePoint, it becomes more accessible. “Organizations often have disparate repositories of videos among different groups that are not aware of each other,” Blankenship explains. “Once they are stored natively in SharePoint, these islands of information can be surfaced in the group area. Others start adding their own material and there is a snowball effect that leads to making this content much more useful in the enterprise.”