Incorporating Podcasts into your SharePoint Site
These days, my life is filled with SharePoint, Outlook, and podcasts. Podcasting is such a wonderful medium for content delivery, so I thought I would see just how I could pull these three technologies together.
Here are the THREE different ways I came up with to incorporate podcasts into your SharePoint site.
ONE:
If you are lucky enough to have a SharePoint hosting company that provides a RSS reader web part or you host your own SharePoint site and have installed a RSS reader web part for your users, you can use it to display podcasts that would be beneficial for your users. Below is a screenshot of the RSS FeedReader that is displaying three different podcast feeds, and only showing the most recent 5 episodes for each feed.
The properties window of the feed reader allows me to set a filter type and number to better control what gets displayed in a single window.
Some podcast episodes will launch a player immediately, as seen below.
And some will open the blog post where the podcast is located. Here, you can read the additional notes on the episode and have access to other features available on the blog itself.
TWO:
I found a couple of multi-episode podcast players that allowed me to put in my feed url, and it produced some html that I was able to insert into a Content Editor Web Part. The end result looks like this:
Clicking on the player image provides a pop-up podcast player, which lists all the episodes in the podcast. Clicking on the title of the episode I wish to hear starts playing it.
You can find these players at:
· Podcast Pickle: http://www.podcastpickle.com/app/player/free.php
· PuPuPlayer: http://www.pupuplatters.com/pupuplayer/try.htm
THREE:
Now that SharePoint sites have blogs, and the blogs have RSS feeds, well…you get where I’m going here, right? I posted a blog post with links to a couple of my training videos to my SharePoint site blog. What I particularly like about using blogs for your podcast is that you can write up additional notes and provide more links to supporting files, etc. People can comment on it as well. Plus, text has the added bonus of being searchable.
I have the Outlook RSS reader watching my SharePoint Company Blog, so when a new podcast gets posted I’ll see it.
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Now, a fourth way, that I just thought of, might be to create a document library to upload the audio files to, grab the RSS feed from the library and aggregate it in your reader, like Outlook 2007. I’m trying this out right now, but I’m still waiting to see if it works like I think it might. I’ll keep you posted…
...OK, here are the results of the fourth way.
It does pull the individual files into the Outlook RSS reader, however, here are some observations about this method:
1) First, you'll be uploading the files to your SharePoint server, so space may become an issue over time, especially if you are uploading video files and if you use a hosted solution where your plan comes with a set storage limit.
2) Also, if you don't name your files accurately, people won't have any idea what the episode is about until they listen or watch it.
3) As the items are being displayed in Outlook, it only shows a link back to the "Article". Clicking the link takes you directly to the SharePoint Site where the file is stored. You can play it from there.
Andrea Kalli
Andrea Kalli Virtual Trainer and Assistant, LLC
www.virtualassist.net
