Will Holland is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill, where he champions our core value of “Better Together” with his focus on helping employees thrive by building meaningful connections in the workplace. Outside of work, Will can usually be found at the nearest soccer pitch, enjoying watching his children play or rooting for Atlanta United FC.
One of the most common challenges we coach our clients on is keeping your intranet content fresh. To use an analogy, if your intranet is a garden, fresh content is the water you need to routinely supply to keep it growing. For our small business clients, that time commitment can seem daunting, if not impossible. As a small business, we get you. That’s why we we’ve developed a series of tips to help keep your SharePoint intranet fresh with minimal effort.
In this blog post, we’re going to focus on just one of those: leveraging your recorded meetings as an evergreen source of content.
Leverage Microsoft Teams Meeting Recordings
If you’re a business that’s running on Microsoft 365, then all your meetings should include Microsoft Teams. At a minimum, you should host and record all your ritualistic meetings (Daily Standups, All-Hands, Town Halls, etc.) through Microsoft Teams.
Recording these meetings whenever possible helps everyone be more productive during and after the meetings. These recordings also become invaluable pieces of content that you can display inside your intranet, making crucial information readily accessible to everyone.
Our goal is to ensure that the recordings people care about most are displayed on our intranet with minimal effort. To give you an idea of how the result plays out, the screenshot below, taken from our own intranet, highlights our “Recent Videos” section.
Every Tuesday morning, ThreeWill employees get together for an internal knowledge-sharing session we call The Morning Brew. We host and record this meeting via Microsoft Teams, and we have configured our intranet to display the recordings automatically. This helps ThreeWill keep skills sharpened and it helps me keep the intranet looking fresh.
Making a dynamic “Recent Videos” section in SharePoint in two steps
Creating your own “Recent Videos” section like we use here at ThreeWill is surprisingly simple. There are only two mandatory steps. The trick here is understanding how Microsoft Teams stores your meeting recordings and how best to display them in SharePoint.
Step #1 – Host and record your meetings with Microsoft Teams
When you schedule a meeting with Microsoft Teams, you either schedule it as a “private” meeting or as a “channel” meeting, depending of you specified the name of channel when you organized the meeting. If this is news to you, I highly recommend reading the following blog: What is a Teams Channel Meeting and Why Should I use it?.
For now, just understand this: If the meeting is scheduled as a channel meeting, the recording will be saved in the channel’s ‘Recordings’ folder; otherwise, it will be saved in the meeting organizer’s OneDrive. Once we know where to find the recordings, we just need to decide how we want to display the content in SharePoint.
If you are unsure which type of meeting you have, the easiest way to tell is by viewing the meeting details in Microsoft Teams. The image below is from the blog post I referenced earlier, showing that a channel has been selected.
Step #2 – Display Videos in SharePoint
There are a small handful of different web parts that you can display video content in SharePoint Online. For our purposes, though, we’re going to focus on two web parts: Stream and the Highlighted Content web part.
The new Stream webpart is my personal preference for displaying video content in SharePoint. Not only does it allow me to specify a specific folder, but it offers the best user experience option in SharePoint. Aside from it being more visually appealing, in my opinion, it allows users to play the video from the page instead of opening the video in a new tab.
It also lets you specify a folder for storing recordings, including folders in your personal OneDrive. If your meeting is NOT a channel meeting, then this webpart is your best choice.
I choose the Stream webpart if I want to display one or more videos in a single or two-column layout. Putting it in a smaller section results in a carousel experience that I don’t like as much. In these cases, I will typically turn to the Highlighted Content webpart, as it presents videos using a list layout that I find looks better vertically.
The image below compares the two webparts when placed in smaller columns, with the Highlighted Content webpart being shown on the right. I prefer the one on the right because it makes it obvious that there are additional videos for me to watch without requiring user interaction or distracting movement.
Conclusion
At ThreeWill, our mission is to help your employees thrive. One critical component of that is keeping your employees connected to what’s happening in and around your organization. To help our clients provide that connectedness, we frequently help them establish an Intelligent Intranet, built on SharePoint online.
That is, however, only the beginning. For an intranet to fully recognize its value, people must visit it, and people will only visit if they know they’ll have something new to see. The heart of your intranet will always be the content you create to support and encourage your employees, like an article to celebrate your associate of the month.
However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t also have a treasure trove of content just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered; You just need to know where to look. Once found, though, don’t be afraid to leverage it to help keep your SharePoint intranet fresh with minimal effort.
CONTACT THREEWILL TO LEARN MORE TIPS TO HELP KEEP YOUR EMPLOYEES THRIVING
