Redirecting the Stream tile to Stream (on SharePoint) will roll out to standard release tenants from now.
Office365 support folks may ask themselves what to do – enable it now or wait until more is known? Please note Stream will only be decommissioned when the functionality in SharePoint is comparable to Stream now – which is not the case at the moment. I expect you will have a year at the very least.
I have done some experiments in the last few weeks (June 2022), to give you a better idea of the current consequences of this change, and this is my advice:
- Is Stream new for (or not yet used by) your organization?
Redirect the tile as soon as possible, and instruct everyone in the new ways of working (video creation and storage, web parts etc.) via SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. - Is Stream an important app for your organization? E.g. you have created a video portal?
Wait until more is known. At the moment there are quite some functionality gaps, although these are being addressed as we speak.- You may want to do some pre-work such as checking out how many videos you have, which department is the most active, and which sites would be the receptors for videos migrated from Stream. Housekeeping could also be a good idea, if you own many videos.
- You could also start instructing people where to create new videos and how to embed videos on pages, how to manage video in SharePoint etc.
- Do you have an idea about how to approach the migration project when it is time? You may want to think about that now as well.
- Do you have a few active pockets of video on Stream, and the number of likes, views and comments are not very important for the owners?
Suggest a manual migration (download from Stream to PC and upload to SharePoint) to the owners, which will reduce the complexity of your migration project later, by doing a few things now.
I have written a few posts to help you with each of these scenarios:
What experiments have I done?
- I have redirected my Stream tile in Office365 to Stream (on SharePoint).
I found that this redirects to a new page in SharePoint, comparable to the Office365 homepage, where you can see all videos on OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint you have access to.
Videos that are in Stream stay there and will eventually be deleted. This means any video on Stream that you want to keep, needs to be migrated by you. - This means you suddenly have a migration project. Although I expect it will be some time before Stream gets decommissioned, it will take thought, preparation, communication and other work.
I have a few suggestions for that project. - Microsoft will provide a Migration tool, which I have not seen yet. I expect this will move videos with all their metadata (including comments, views, likes), but YOU will have to decide where the videos will go.
If you do not want to wait, and/or if you have a few Stream channels where the metadata are not terribly important, you can reduce complexity by moving those videos manually. I have checked what happens when you download from Stream and upload to SharePoint. - Do you have Stream videos embedded on your SharePoint intranet and other pages? You will need to change web parts and link to videos in SharePoint.
I checked which web parts are best:- Highlighted Content for videos from one site
- Quick Links for a hand-picked selection of videos
- File Viewer for a single video, illustrating a News post
- As video is treated as a document, I have also checked if the Document Library web part would be a good web part to display video, as you can configure it more than the Highlighted Content. However, it is a lot of extra work and it is not better than the Stream or Highlighted Content web parts.
- Do your colleagues use Stream (desktop or app) to create video’s? You may want to wean them off and suggest another app from the Office365 suite. These are my recommendations:
- the OneDrive mobile app for their impromptu and personal videos
- a recorded meeting on Teams desktop for more official videos, such as instructions or speeches.
When you have access to the SharePoint Admin and Message centers, you can see some improvements for Stream being planned, e.g. inline playing in the Hero web part.
What’s next?
I hope I have saved you some time by doing and sharing my experiments. If anything new pops up, like further improvements to Stream (on SharePoint) I may create a new post.
Good luck!
