Autodesk Screencast & SharePoint

If you use SharePoint 13, this is a great way to share your knowledge throughout your company and even beyond.  If you have not used Autodesk Screencast yet… you should.  This is Autodesk’s free video recording and sharing tool.  For more information and a free download to get started, go visit the Screencast website.

If your videos are published as public, they can be seen by anyone searching the site, very much the same as on YouTube.  Search the site to learn some great tips or tricks.  Then get started practicing making your own videos of what’s happening on your computer screen.  This is a great way to create training videos, or even to capture what you are seeing to share in the Discussion Forums if you have a question.  The gurus out there can help you a lot quicker if they can see exactly what behavior you are seeing.

Internally, we use SharePoint to share documents across departments, so I got the idea that it might be nice to create and share some simple training videos on Vault procedures for those people in my company who use Vault, but are not really familiar with it.  Especially those who only use it for the creation of Engineering Change Orders.  So here is a simple way to share these videos across your company with SharePoint 13.

On your SharePoint page, (assuming you have rights to editing these pages) look up at the top for a menu that contains Browse, Page & Publish.  Select page and a ribbon menu appears, then select Edit.  You should be prompted to check the page out for editing, so do so.  It won’t let you make changes or save them if you do not check the page out.  If you do not have adequate permissions, see your SharePoint administrator…. bring candy.  Once you are in the page editing mode, look to the upper right for a gear symbol to edit Settings.  Grab the pull down and select Add an App.  You should see a list of available apps, you want to find one called “Links”.  Select that and give the app a name, such as Cool Videos.  Accept the changes, and you will see the app added to the list of site contents.

Return to your main page, still in editing mode, and select an open area on your page layout.  From the menu along the top select Insert, and App Part.  You will see a list of the available apps to add to the page, find the Cool Videos you just created and select it. Click the Add button, the app will be placed in the area of your layout you selected.  If this is the only change you would like to make, go back to the page menu, and select Save & Publish.  This will save your changes and check the page back in.  You should now see the app on your SharePoint site, but it will not contain any videos.  Instead you will see a button that says “new link”.  On to the next stage.

Navigate to the Autodesk Screencast page and log in.  In the upper right corner, you should see your name with an arrow, click that and go to “My Screencasts”, to see a list of all of the videos you have published to the site.  On each video, you will see “Get Embedded URL”.  Select that and copy the contents to your clipboard (ctrl c).

Now return to your SharePoint site, and use that “new link” button under your new Cool Videos app.  Paste the URL into the path window, and give the video a name.  Add notes or any other information you want and save the changes.  Return to the site, and your cool Screencast video is now available for viewing to anyone who has access to your SharePoint site.

In the spirit of this post… here is a video showing the steps I have just described.

EDIT:

Learned another way of doing this today.  Instead of choosing a “Links” app, add an app in SharePoint called “Asset Library”.  This basically works the same way, except that it will show a thumbnail of your video and let you play it right from your browser.  The catch is that you have to download the video from Screencast and store it locally or on your network drive.  I think I like this even better!

Enjoy!