Managing Rich Media Assets in SharePoint Server 2010 (ECM)
Learn about the support in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for digital technology and digital media content.
Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010
Enterprise organizations increasingly use digital technology and digital media content, such as audio and video files, to communicate better within the enterprise and with customers. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides optimum support for audio and video files that are smaller than 150 MB in size, includes improved support of metadata extraction from image files, and can support audio and video files designed for demonstrations and presentations up to 2 GB in size.
Rich Media Management Feature Overview
For video, SharePoint Server 2010 supports adding video to different types of SharePoint Server 2010 pages and playing video through the following:
A media player, built on Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, that supports themes powered by Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML)
A Video content type for use in asset libraries
A Media Web Part that you can use to include video in pages and Web Part Pages
Support for selecting videos in the asset picker
For audio, SharePoint Server 2010 provides:
An Audio content type for use with asset libraries that supports storage and playback of audio files.
Support for selecting audio files in the asset picker.
For images, SharePoint Server 2010 provides:
- An Image content type for use with asset libraries that supports storing and viewing image files.
Supported Scenarios for Digital Asset Management in SharePoint
Rich Media Management in SharePoint Server 2010 is designed to support including digital media content in three main scenarios:
On a portal, team, or Internet publishing site
On community-generated audio and video sites
On learning and training sites
Managing Rich Media Content on a Portal or Internet Publishing Site
On portals and Internet publishing sites, content submissions are usually managed. Regardless of the content type, to submit content to one of these sites you must follow a process or adhere to a policy that controls aspects of the content that you are submitting. This includes understanding more subjective editorial considerations such as how relevant the content is to the site's audience, or more concrete technical specifics such as compression rate and file format.
Navigating to find and view digital media content follows the same site-specific navigation and viewing experience as other content types, for example, written documents or image files. Audio and video content often appears inline with other content on the site, such as HTML text.
Portal and Internet publishing sites host relatively short audio files and video files with small file sizes, usually not exceeding 5 MB for audio and 25 MB for video. These sites typically host no more than several thousand audio or video files.
See the Microsoft PressPass site for examples of video content use on an Internet publishing site.
Managing Community-Generated Audio and Video Sites
In contrast to portal and Internet publishing sites, community-generated audio and video sites, take a different approach to submissions, navigation, and viewing.
Community-generated video sites do not usually manage submissions. Any user can upload audio and video files, with little or no formal submission process. Quality of service is managed by enforcing technical constraints such as file size limits. Ensuring that digital media cannot exceed a certain file size maintains consistency and helps ensure that site content performs reliably.
Users of community-generated audio and video sites find digital media by searching or navigating based on audio or video file metadata. For example, a site that uses SharePoint Server 2010 or Microsoft ASP.NET–based Web Parts to host video content organizes and presents the videos by using metadata associated with each video file. Organizing and presenting video by using metadata enables the site to use both static and dynamic video presentation models:
Media is static when the URL is human-readable and selectable.
Media is dynamic when a media player is selected but no explicit media URL is provided. The player can receive a media URL at run time and display media from that URL on a client computer without posting back to the server.
Sites that host community-generated video usually have low file size limits (usually smaller than 25 MB), but can host millions of videos. Community sites that host audio files (typically podcasts) manage file sizes that range from 5 MB to 75 MB and that have a running time from a few minutes to an hour or more.
Managing Learning and Training Sites
Sites that host instructional videos, such as portals and Internet publishing sites, manage submissions. The videos that these sites host are usually professionally produced and submitted, and tagged by experts. Occasionally, learning and training videos contain metadata such as keywords, accompanying text transcripts, and synchronized Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
Learning and training sites manage navigation and viewing options and behavior for video content and also for the entire site structure. Community feedback mechanisms such as ratings might also factor into an organization's overall approach to managing learning and training sites.
Learning and training sites usually host thousands of medium-to-large videos, ranging in size from 100 MB to 500 MB. Audio files are often smaller, and usually range in size from 50 MB to 150 MB.
SharePoint Programming Model for Rich Media Management
SharePoint Server 2010 includes several new types and a client object model. The Table 1 lists and describes new types in the API.
Table 1. New types for rich media management
Namespace |
Type |
Description |
|---|---|---|
Provides a way to set the source template for the media player. |
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Stores a MediaFieldValue object. |
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The MediaWebPart Web control supports both static and dynamic media resource feeds, including the following parameters:
|
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Adds a media button to the ribbon. |
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The state of the MediaWebPart Web Part. State options include Inline, Pop-Up Overlay, and Full Screen. In Inline mode, when you first click Play on the media player embedded in a Web page, SharePoint Server 2010 plays the media inline on the Web page where it can be viewed with other HTML content. In Pop-Up Overlay mode, when the media player is in a restored state, it pops up and overlays the parent UI on the page. In this state, the media player can be maximized into a full-screen mode or dismissed and returned to inline mode. When the media player is maximized, the video is playing in full-screen mode. |
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Supports rendering the MediaWebPart as a field control, and provides properties that are configurable. For example, you can modify this Web control to configure the MediaWebPart type to play automatically or loop until stopped. A page layout designer can also configure restrictions on the media field control. For example, the designer can restrict page authors from setting parameters for the control or for configuration. While the properties are disabled to prevent changes, the corresponding values are still displayed in the UI. |
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Provides a standard way of hosting audio and video files on a SharePoint site. The media player includes the following capabilities:
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The Table 2 lists and describes ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) files that are important to digital asset management programming on the client side.
Table 2. Client object model for digital asset management
File |
Description |
|---|---|
Mediaplayer.js |
Includes logic for the Media Player Web Part. |
See Also
Tasks
How to: Configure the MediaWebPart Object Using JavaScript (ECM)
Concepts
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Development in SharePoint Server 2010
Disk-Based Caching for Binary Large Objects in SharePoint Server 2010 (ECM)
Other Resources
Using the Silverlight Object Model