Have you noticed lately that we’ve been embedding a lot more video in our regular blog posts? That’s because we found a great SharePoint solution, originally discovered by our good friend Michael Gannotti.
It’s called
ERTE, the Enhanced Rich Text Editor for SharePoint, and you can download it for free on Codeplex:
www.codeplex.com/erte
You might be wondering why this is such a big deal when, after all, people have been embedding videos in blogs for a long time. Well, when you create a blog in SharePoint, the rich text editor field strips out all embedded code, including video embedded code. Even if you use Live Writer, you’ll discover your embedded video turns into an embedded graphic that links to the video (where it's hosted).
How it works
Once you complete the instructions on Codeplex, you see a new button in your SharePoint rich text editor (next to the source HTML button), like this…
When you click the button, a dialog box like this opens…
Just add some alternate text, paste in the embedded code, and click Insert.
Embed videos from MSN, YouTube, and internal sources
You can easily embed videos from any video sharing site (MSN Video, YouTube, etc.) that includes an "Embed" option. You can also use this solution for videos internal to your organization. Just upload the video (like a .wmv) to a document library, note the path to the video, and embed it along with common HTML embed code.
This solution works for both SharePoint blogs and wikis, so you can use it in both places.
I hope you enjoy this solution as much as we have. It’s nice to provide inline videos without sending your users away to another site.
Thanks!
Tom
SharePoint End User Content Team