News

Microsoft Stream Gradually Getting SharePoint Capabilities

• By Kurt Mackie
• 09/26/2022

The Microsoft Stream video-sharing service for organizations is getting "natively" integrated with SharePoint as a Microsoft 365 product, according to a Monday Microsoft announcement.

Many might have thought that Microsoft Stream already was an integrated Microsoft 365 service. Microsoft Stream is offered through Microsoft 365 subscription plans, as is SharePoint, but their integration has been a work in progress.

The integration will be a gradual, feature-by-feature kind of effort, per this Microsoft document description, which also noted that the so-called "classic" Microsoft Stream will get replaced at some point:

There won't be a specific point in which Stream (on SharePoint) is "released" as a whole. As new features for videos in M365 are ready we'll release them on their own. There will be a steady flow of new features for videos being added to M365. At the point when we have a significant number of features in M365 for videos we'll set a retirement date for Stream (classic). Until then you can continue to use Stream (classic), put your videos in OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer which is Stream (on SharePoint), or use both experiences depending on the use case.

Microsoft described moving its own videos over from Stream classic to the new SharePoint-integrated Stream in this Sept. 13 Microsoft post. It's currently working on a new mass migration tool to move videos from Microsoft Azure to SharePoint internally at Microsoft.

"A new migration tool is being developed to help teams across Microsoft move videos from Microsoft Azure over to SharePoint," stated Farnaz Hafezi, a program manager on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience Team, in the Sept. 13 post. "We're helping to pilot and test the migration tool. We have one of the largest sized tenants in the world to migrate, so we want to be strategic."

The timing for this migration tool wasn't described, and it's unclear if it'll be publicly available at some point.

The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team helped with the Microsoft Stream transition into SharePoint, and was aided by the Office Media and MSW intranet teams at Microsoft, according to the Sept. 13 post.

"There are things we can do in modern Stream that were difficult to do in classic," stated David Potts, a site administrator for MSW, in the Sept. 13 post. "Anything you can do in SharePoint, including guest permissions, is now available to us."

The native integration of Microsoft Stream with SharePoint is promising to bring improved capabilities such as "analytics, searchability, governance and better security." Microsoft Stream already had a transcript-creation capability, but it's getting enhanced with the SharePoint integration, Microsoft contended.

Microsoft is currently working on integrating its automation tools to work with Microsoft Stream, such as using "Power Apps and Power Automate to update metadata, move files around, create archives outside of SharePoint, and notify a group of employees that a relevant video has been posted," according to Potts. The timing for such automation improvements wasn't described.

Microsoft Stream is currently included as a feature in Office 365 E1, E3 and E5 subscription plans, according to this pricing page.