Almost exactly a year to the day after introducing Stream, Microsoft Corp. has released the video sharing service into general availability to help companies manage their multimedia content.

The platform is a successor to Office 365 Video that is available as an extension for the productivity suite and as a standalone product. It shares many similarities with enterprise social networks such as Microsoft’s Yammer, except the inspiration is YouTube rather than Facebook Inc. or Twitter Inc. The idea is to let professionals consume company content through a friendly interface that can meet the usability standards set by consumer services.

To that end, Microsoft has spent the past year enhancing Stream’s feature set. The service now boasts a revamped homepage that displays a personalized video feed for every user along with new machine learning-powered search features. Thanks to the latter addition, workers can look up terms related to their areas of interest and Stream will bring up videos in which they’re mentioned.

The times at which a word or phrase is spoken appear in a transcript panel next to each clip that makes it possible to quickly jump to the relevant point. For added measure, Microsoft has included a timeline feature at the bottom that highlights who speaks at what parts of a video. It’s designed to serve as a sort of visual table of contents in scenarios where a text-based breakdown doesn’t suffice.

Over on the backend, administrators have access to new features for managing company content. The arguably biggest enhancement is integration with Office 365 Groups, which provides the ability to restrict who can access videos. It’s designed to ease the task of sharing content within departments and teams. 

Microsoft will start migrating companies from Office 365 Video to Stream in the second half of 2017, giving its developers time to bring over features such as video view analytics that have not yet been ported. The company initially plans to make the new service accessible on an opt-in basis and will gradually widen the rollout from there.

Image: Microsoft