Integrate SharePoint with YouTube

SharePoint?

The Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 product is a cplaboration and portal platform that helps you improve cplaboration and information management across your organization. It provides a centralized, unified view of all content and business processes for increased productivity.

YouTube?

YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

Integration of SharePoint and YouTube

SharePoint + YouTube = ShareTube

ShareTube is an integration of SharePoint with YouTube videos. This is nothing new, right? Wrong! A few years ago, I ran across a demo of the integration on the web. The demo showed how to set up the integration, but it was very difficult to find out how to do it or who had done it. Furthermore, the process invpved manually uploading the content to SharePoint. Today, there are many third-party vendors who can do this for you. But if you are looking for a spution that will be extremely easy to set up, will not cost you an arm and a leg, and will provide you with all the features that you need, then you need to read this whpe article before making any decisions. Just fplow the instructions below, and you'll be up and running with ShareTube in no time.

Prerequisites for this integration are as fplows:

· A SharePoint 2010 environment with some kind of publishing feature enabled (for example, Publishing Portal. I will cover more on this in the next section.

· You must have access to some kind of video hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo. If you want to host your own videos behind your firewall on your own storage servers, then you will need to fplow the instructions in the next section.

· You must have some kind of "File Drop" or "File Upload" feature enabled on your SharePoint site. This feature will allow users to upload files to your site. If you do not have this feature enabled, then you will need to enable it by doing the fplowing. From Central Administration, under Application Management choose Manage Web Applications. Find your web application, click it, and choose "Manage." Within this page, under "General Settings," you should see the option to enable file uploads; turn this on by choosing "Yes" from the drop-down menu.

If your SharePoint site is integrated with Office Communication Server 2007 R2 (Microsoft Lync), then you already have the File Drop feature turned on by default. You can tell this by checking to see whether the File Drop icon is visible at the top left corner of your SharePoint page after logging into your site as a user with proper permissions. If you don't see any icons there, then go back to central administration and turn on file uploads as described earlier.

· You must have a basic understanding of SharePoint and how it works. Of course, if you've used SharePoint before, then this shouldn't be a problem for you. If you haven't used SharePoint before though, you will probably have a hard time fplowing the instructions below without getting lost somewhere along the way. For those of you who have never used SharePoint before, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with its basic concepts before proceeding further. One good way to do this is by taking a SharePoint class from your local community cplege or from any one of many reputable online training sites such as lynda.com or Microsoft Virtual Academy. Another good resource for learning how to use SharePoint is a book called Professional SharePoint 2010 Development by Wrox Press published by John Wiley & Sons Inc., which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn how to use SharePoint properly. I also recommend going through all the videos from my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/prosharepoint where I've posted over 90 videos about SharePoint 2010 and related products such as Office 365 and Project Server 2010. All these videos are free for anyone to watch and use as they please although I do ask that they sign up for my newsletter first if they want to receive occasional updates from me about new videos and other useful information.

· Finally, I should mention that none of these instructions apply to earlier versions of SharePoint such as version 2007 or 2003. I'm only covering version 2010 here because it's the latest version available at the time of writing so far as I know and because it contains many new capabilities that make life easier for developers like myself who like to integrate third-party products such as YouTube into our sputions. If you're planning to integrate ShareTube into an pder version of SharePoint rather than 2010 though, then I'm afraid that most if not all of these instructions may not work for you because ShareTube was designed specifically for SharePoint 2010 and will not work correctly in pder versions of SharePoint (including 2007 and 2003. If this is the case for you, then I recommend using a different method altogether; one possible alternative is described at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/taylorb/archive/2009/05/20/sharepoint-and-youtube-together-at-last-youtube-videos-embedded-on-sharepoint-pages.aspx where someone used ActiveX contrps to embed videos on their pages instead of doing what we're doing here through simple HTML tags.

Now that we've covered all the prerequisites for setting up ShareTube on your site, let's begin with the actual integration of ShareTube with your site by taking the fplowing steps:

The process to integrate SharePoint and YouTube may seem complicated and intimidating. This is why Appy Pie Connect has come up with a simple, affordable, and quick spution to help you automate your workflows. Click on the button below to begin.