OneDrive and SharePoint will be the storage location for video in Office365. I have already shown earlier how to display your videos on SharePoint pages.
I was curious to learn what you can do with the document library web part for this purpose, knowing that the recommended Highlighted Content web part lacks some functionality compared to the Stream web part. I also liked the Card view for the Document Library, so I wanted to check what it can do. Not just because I like playing around with these things, but also so you, Office365 support person, does not have to do it yourself! You are already busy enough.
So the question is:
Can the Document Library web part show videos in a way that is closer to the Stream web part?
What are we aiming for?
As a reminder, this is a Stream web part for multiple videos. You see thumbnail, title, # views and #likes.
And this is the web part for Highlighted Content, displaying Stream (on SharePoint) videos. You see thumbnail, title, uploader, date.
So, how do we go about when we want to tweak the Document Library web part? This is the basic display, using a card view – more about that later. You see the thumbnail, name (with extension), Modified by and Modified date. Almost the same as the Highlighted Content, but less compact.
So, can we tweak the Document Library web part to be more like Stream? And if yes, how?
1. Add Title column to the All Documents view
The Document Library web part displays the file name, with an extension. If this does not bother your audience, you can skip this item.
If you want to display the title, you need to add the Title column to your All documents view. In most cases you will need to manually add the titles to your videos. This is work, but it will give you the opportunity to use a better title than the file name.
Do not remove the Name (linked to document with edit menu) column because you may need it to make individual adjustments.
Please note the Title column does not show in bold. This makes it slightly harder to notice than the Name column.
2. Create a Tiles view
In your document library you will need a view in Tiles mode before you can create Cards. So, first of all, save your standard All Documents list view again as “Page View” and then save it again as Tiles. This will be the view to add to the page, after some configuration.
If you want to display other columns in your Page view, please add them now.
3. Use different views
You now have the following views:
- All Documents for maintenance, adding columns etc.,
- Page View to display on your page.
Make sure you know what’s what and do not delete either. You can create other views if needed.
4. Configure Cards
You can only configure Cards in the document library itself, not on the web page. So go to your document library, open the Page View and select “Format current view” from the bottom of the view menu. (see screenshot above)
Then click on “Edit card” and the Card view will pop up with options to change it.
You can select which columns to show, and decide if you want people’s pics or not.
You can also decide if you want to show the column names. They can provide extra information, but take up vertical space, so it is up to you to see what works best.
Below an example without the column names and the Modified By (as this is often not relevant), but with an extra choice column called “Topic”.
5. Showing the number of Views 😒
I know you want to see what the end product looks like on a page, but we are not there yet!
I have tried to find a way to easily show Views and Likes, as they are shown together with every Stream video.
Unfortunately I could not make the Views visible on the Card. The number of views are not stored in a column.
The only way you can see how many hits this video has had is in the document library itself. Select a video (1), click the “document details” icon (2) and you can see the number of views in the popup. (3) 😒
You can not make this visible on the page, not even when you have enabled the command bar.
6. Showing the number of Likes 😒
Another thing I want to show is the number of likes. I know there is a Rating option in document libraries, so I checked out this post from Gregory Zelfond to see how I enable that again.
I did not see the Rating option in my document library and in the video Greg confirms my suspicion that this is only available in Team sites. But my Intranet site is a Communication site, obviously, and it makes much more sense to me to have a rating option in a large-audience Communication site than in a limited-access Team site!
So, just for the sake of it, I replicated my video library in a Team site and enabled the Ratings.
With Likes it looks like this:
And with Star ratings it looks like this:
Well, that looks cool, huh?
It does, BUT you can not click on the heart or the stars to give your feedback – you can only do that in the list view in the document library itself…
Another disappointment!
7. Showing the number of Comments 😒
This is not available on the Stream (Classic) web part, but you can see it in the Stream (Classic) portal and on every video page.
I checked if there is a column that shows comments, to add to the Card. Indeed, in the View configuration there is a column called Comment count but it does not get added to the View when you select it.
(Number of) Comments are only visible when you open the video.
8. Configuring the page
Now it is time to add the web part to the page. I used the following setup for the web part:
- One column with the Document Library web part
- Page View
- Hide the command bar
- Show “See all” button
And this is the best I could do (in a Team site)
Conclusion:
The Document Library web part is a little more flexible than the Highlighted Content web part, so you can vary in what you show on your SharePoint page. It takes some work to make it ready (you need to create and configure an extra view at least).
It does not show exactly like the Stream web part, so if you are looking for views, likes and comments we will have to wait until Microsoft comes up with a web part more like Stream.
There will be a SharePoint video collections page for Teams, that may do the trick. I have not seen that yet. More information here, please scroll to “In development – Release June 2022” for the announcement.
In any case I enjoyed myself with all the investigative work!