SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 8: 'What? I Can't Embed Video in a Blog Post? You're Kidding, Right?'

John Anderson — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:30:00 GMT

I may have mentioned the following video-related discovery earlier in this series but, if so, I'm pretty sure it would've been nothing more than a casual aside. Well, it's now time for me to devote a post to the matter. As was the case with several of these lessons learned, at first I thought that surely it must be user error on my part ... in this case, the only alternative explanation to user error seemed to be the frankly unbelievable notion that SharePoint 2010 didn't support the embedding of video into blog posts out-of-the-box. That couldn't be right, could it?

Well, it certainly appeared to be the case when I first tried to embed a video into a post, only to discover that, unlike pretty much any other blogging platform you could name, there didn't appear to be any way to do so, either via a WYSIWIG interface or otherwise. I made this frustrating discovery a couple of months ago when I was attempting to embed a video into one of my pre-Sharing the Point tour blog posts and, in the interests of time, I ultimately ended up just linking off to the video instead. A week or two later, on the tour itself, Mark Miller made reference to embedded videos not being supported out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2010 and, sharing my own experience with him, I expressed my shock that this was actually the case.

Let's fast forward to the present now, and the sharing of the good news that I've since learned, which is that that there are not one but (at least) two workarounds for the problem available. After putting in some investigatory time (read: a few minutes of Googling), I turned up evidence that videos can be embedded into SharePoint 2010 blog posts after all. The only catch is that it's probably going to be the rare end user who will possess both the permissions and the knowledge necessary to implement the workarounds without the assistance of an administrator and/or a designer.

Nevertheless, workarounds do exist, and the first of them is made possible through a combination of the out-of-the-box Media Web Part and the insertion of "a few lines of JavaScript" to your master page. This first workaround is described in detail by Mihai Coman in his blog post on the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog, Video Blogging with JavaScript and the Media Web Part.

The second option which will add video-embedding capability to your SharePoint 2010 blog is a code-free solution, and it's accomplished via the Enhanced Rich Text for SharePoint Extended (ERTE), which is available as a free CodePlex download. An overview of how ERTE works (and it works not just in SharePoint blogs, but in any SharePoint Rich Text field) is provided in the GetThePoint blog post, Embed video in your SharePoint blogs and wikis.

I haven't yet had a chance to attempt to personally put either of these workarounds in place in a test environment, but doing so is now officially on the list of to-dos I've been creating for myself in the course of learning the lessons that I've been blogging in this series.

And with that, I've come to the end of this little series detailing the SharePoint 2010 lessons I learned while helping to construct (and blogging extensively on) the Sharing the Point website. I hope that my own discoveries will prove helpful to others on their own SharePoint 2010 journey. Stay tuned as I begin circling back to learn (and share) even more as I begin to tackle the aforementioned to-dos in the weeks ahead.

UPDATE/CORRECTION - Courtesy of Dux Raymond Sy, this just in: Turns out that ERTE does not work on SharePoint 2010 (due to the Ribbon), but the recommended-by-Dux fix is available at the Kirk Evans Blog post, Embedding Flash Video in SharePoint Blogs. Dux tells me that they've got Kirk's fix in place on Innovative-e's public-facing SharePoint 2010 site, so you can have a look at the solution in action there. Thanks, Dux!

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint Blank : Enhanced Rich Text for SharePoint Extended, Lessons Learned, Innovative-e

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 8: 'What? I Can't Embed Video in a Blog Post? You're Kidding, Right?'