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Added final bullet about download tracking feature
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Sam Yates
Sam Yates
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Yes, I've spent a decent number of hours on Podcast Kit deployment, and it is very much suited to the use case you're describing. We have been reasonably happy with it, but we also have a staff of relatively knowledgeable SharePoint developers and admins. You should keep a few caveats in mind if you want to use it though:

  • It's really a hodge-podge of a lot of different components (many solutions, features, custom field types, etc). This shows when you want to figure out a change
  • Be careful if you plan to host this on a "shared" SharePoint farm with, say, a bunch of team sites. You'll have lots of new things showing up in your environment that you may not want users messing with (e.g. a "Network File Store" field type that can be added to any list)
  • In any given "release" there are going to be bugs, so be prepared to deal with them. There may also be some parts you don't have source code to. For instance, I never could find all the source code necessary to build the IS Content Query Web Part that is used for creating the views on most of the pages
  • You'll need a license of Expression Encoder, so it's not really quite free
  • Most of the functions in PKS (outside of re-encoding on the server) are doable out-of-the-box or at least without deploying any code to the server in SP2010. There's an internal MS whitepaper that has detailed steps on how to do just that. So you may want to hold off and look at that as an option if you can wait a couple of months.
  • The download tracker only tells you if the user has downloaded a video, not whether they have watched it

Yes, I've spent a decent number of hours on Podcast Kit deployment, and it is very much suited to the use case you're describing. We have been reasonably happy with it, but we also have a staff of relatively knowledgeable SharePoint developers and admins. You should keep a few caveats in mind if you want to use it though:

  • It's really a hodge-podge of a lot of different components (many solutions, features, custom field types, etc). This shows when you want to figure out a change
  • Be careful if you plan to host this on a "shared" SharePoint farm with, say, a bunch of team sites. You'll have lots of new things showing up in your environment that you may not want users messing with (e.g. a "Network File Store" field type that can be added to any list)
  • In any given "release" there are going to be bugs, so be prepared to deal with them. There may also be some parts you don't have source code to. For instance, I never could find all the source code necessary to build the IS Content Query Web Part that is used for creating the views on most of the pages
  • You'll need a license of Expression Encoder, so it's not really quite free
  • Most of the functions in PKS (outside of re-encoding on the server) are doable out-of-the-box or at least without deploying any code to the server in SP2010. There's an internal MS whitepaper that has detailed steps on how to do just that. So you may want to hold off and look at that as an option if you can wait a couple of months.

Yes, I've spent a decent number of hours on Podcast Kit deployment, and it is very much suited to the use case you're describing. We have been reasonably happy with it, but we also have a staff of relatively knowledgeable SharePoint developers and admins. You should keep a few caveats in mind if you want to use it though:

  • It's really a hodge-podge of a lot of different components (many solutions, features, custom field types, etc). This shows when you want to figure out a change
  • Be careful if you plan to host this on a "shared" SharePoint farm with, say, a bunch of team sites. You'll have lots of new things showing up in your environment that you may not want users messing with (e.g. a "Network File Store" field type that can be added to any list)
  • In any given "release" there are going to be bugs, so be prepared to deal with them. There may also be some parts you don't have source code to. For instance, I never could find all the source code necessary to build the IS Content Query Web Part that is used for creating the views on most of the pages
  • You'll need a license of Expression Encoder, so it's not really quite free
  • Most of the functions in PKS (outside of re-encoding on the server) are doable out-of-the-box or at least without deploying any code to the server in SP2010. There's an internal MS whitepaper that has detailed steps on how to do just that. So you may want to hold off and look at that as an option if you can wait a couple of months.
  • The download tracker only tells you if the user has downloaded a video, not whether they have watched it
Source Link
Sam Yates
Sam Yates
  • 406
  • 2
  • 5

Yes, I've spent a decent number of hours on Podcast Kit deployment, and it is very much suited to the use case you're describing. We have been reasonably happy with it, but we also have a staff of relatively knowledgeable SharePoint developers and admins. You should keep a few caveats in mind if you want to use it though:

  • It's really a hodge-podge of a lot of different components (many solutions, features, custom field types, etc). This shows when you want to figure out a change
  • Be careful if you plan to host this on a "shared" SharePoint farm with, say, a bunch of team sites. You'll have lots of new things showing up in your environment that you may not want users messing with (e.g. a "Network File Store" field type that can be added to any list)
  • In any given "release" there are going to be bugs, so be prepared to deal with them. There may also be some parts you don't have source code to. For instance, I never could find all the source code necessary to build the IS Content Query Web Part that is used for creating the views on most of the pages
  • You'll need a license of Expression Encoder, so it's not really quite free
  • Most of the functions in PKS (outside of re-encoding on the server) are doable out-of-the-box or at least without deploying any code to the server in SP2010. There's an internal MS whitepaper that has detailed steps on how to do just that. So you may want to hold off and look at that as an option if you can wait a couple of months.