365 Tube is a project to verify the feasibility of an enterprise-2.0 version of a YouTube-like podcast library based in the cloud. The project can be downloaded from Codeplex http://365tube.codeplex.com/ and used for free. Using the code and instructions posted here everyone can setup a private YouTube-like video library, e.g. for enterprise-2.0 - in a few hours, completely built on cloud components. It also demonstrates how application design has chanced from code-centric (in original pks) to service-centric cloud-modules, scaling from a handful of users up to 10.000s. Why having a private E2.0 video library? Such a library can be used for various training and communication purposes. e.g. CxOs explaining business strategy or quarterly results (businessTV) Roll-out of new SW, e.g. corp-wide Win7 rollout (change management) Training programs, e.g. ITIL training (training) Quality-Awards etc. (celebration) best-practice sharing of any kind Considering time, travel and media savings plus productivity increase companies usually experience high ROIs. Channels may be restricted to certain departments or open for all employees. Material may vary from instant-recording to professional HDTV. In this blog series we are going to see how the demo environment will look like and how to set it up on your own Office 365 environment. The ingredients for this solution are: Office 365 E plan (request a free trial on http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/) Amazon AWS Account (request a free trial on http://aws.amazon.com/free/) Transloadit.com Account (request an account here http://www.transloadit.com) Our 365 Tube demo wsp (download it for free on http://365tube.codeplex.com/) Office 365 will be used for the look & feel and user interaction. We will find there the social capabilities of SharePoint (Ratings, Comments, and MySites). Amazon S3 will be used to store all the videos and thumbnails we are uploading to our 365 Tube environment. Last but not least, Transloadit is used to transcode the uploaded videos and extract the preview thumbnails for our application. It is also responsible to store the videos and thumbnails directly on our Amazon S3 storage in the cloud.As you can see, there are no on-premise services at all. We will rely on cloud services only. A first tour But before we start setting-up our demo environment, I would like to show you how it will look like with some screens. The next picture shows how it will look like when you are entering the site for the first time. You will find three sections showing the latest features, uploaded, and highest rated videos. In the upper right corner you will find a video upload button and a podcast recording button. Latter service allows you to record a podcast directly without having video recording software installed. The service is provided by the third party solution http://www.screencast-o-matic.com. Whenever you upload a video you will be prompted with the screen below. You simply need to choose a video to upload and press “Upload”. This triggers a video upload to the Transloadit.com service, which in turn is responsible to transcode the video into mp4 format and extracting the thumbnails from it. These videos are going to be stored directly on our Amazon S3 store. After the video is processed, you will be redirected to a standard SharePoint Display form. In the background, the form will already contain all Amazon S3 URLs for video and thumbnails. The end-user is not able to see these fields with the help of the Codeplex solution LFMF that I build some time ago (http://listformmanipulation.codeplex.com/). you probably noticed that the author field is pre-filled with the currently logged-in user. The technique for it was already explained in one of my preceding blog posts (http://www.lamber.info/post/2012/04/14/LFMF-–-How-do-I-assign-the-current-user-to-a-SharePoint-form.aspx) After you filled out the metadata and pressed save, the video details are stored also in SharePoint. As you probably already noticed, the videos and thumbnail files are not stored in Office 365, but in Amazon S3. In that way we will not have any storage limitations and issues with our Office 365 account. Office 365 only stores the metadata and links to video files and thumbnails. Finally, when clicking on a video you will be presented with a SharePoint Dialog. In this dialog you are able to play back the video, rate it, and give some comments: Setting-up the demo environment That is more or less everything to show for now. If you are interested in setting up the environment for yourself and play around, then follow the next blog posts: 365 Tube: Setting-up Amazon S3 365 Tube: Setting-up Transloadit.com 365 Tube: Setting-up Office 365 Summary With this blog post we saw how the 365 Tube project is looking like and how to setup the environment for our own. As already mentioned, this first version is a feasibility study and not a fully functional product. It shows, however, that with some good ideas and a mixture of cloud services we are able to provide an interesting service. We will extend our solution with more functionality in future. If you are interested in getting in touch with the project leads just check out our Codeplex page http://365tube.codeplex.com/.   Stay tuned, Patrick

We are almost done. In this blog post we are going to see how to finalize our configuration of 365 Tube, our Youtube-like Podcast library for Office 365 (http://365tube.codeplex.com/). The last step is the creation of a new site collection on our Office 365 Plan E environment and deploy the WSP package that you can find directly here http://365tube.codeplex.com/releases/view/86355. The steps to follow are: Create a new site collection with a custom template Upload the 365 Tube wsp file and activate it Open SharePoint 2010 Designer to configure the connection between Office 365 and Transloadit.com Create a site collection Go and create a new site collection on your Office 365 administrative console. Create a new site collection. Specify the name you like but ensure to choose to select a template later on (located in the “Custom” tab): The creation of the site collection will take a moment. Upload the 365 Tube wsp and activate it In this step we access the site collection that we created before. We are not going to choose the template from the standard templates, but upload our WSP template that you can download from Codeplex http://365tube.codeplex.com/releases/view/86355. We have to click on “Solution Gallery” and upload the WSP file. The next screen should appear. Activate the solution. When reopening the page we should be able to find a new template under the tab “Custom”. Choose the 365 Tube template and confirm the site creation. this operation might take some time. You might even encounter a page not found. Just wait a couple of minutes and try to login again to the page. Finalize the configuration If everything went fine, then you should see a page similar to next screen. We finalize our configuration by telling our 365 Tube solution which Transloadit.com template to use when uploading new videos. We saved the Transloadit.com auth key and template id on our last blog post. Now we are going to integrate them into the 365 Tube solution. This step is easily done by using SharePoint 2010 Designer. Simply open the site collection and locate the Upload.aspx file in the root folder as shown in the next picture: Locate on this page the row with the hidden input field: <input type="hidden" name="params" value="{&quot;auth&quot;:{&quot;key&quot;:&quot;your_transloadit_auth_key&quot;},&quot;template_id&quot;:&quot; your_transloadit_template_id&quot;,&quot;redirect_url&quot;:&quot;http://example.org/upload&quot;}" /> Replace the “your_transloadit_auth_key” and “your_transloadit_template_id” with the auth key and template id we created before and save the page. We are ready to use the solution now. Summary In this last blog post we saw how to finalize the configuration of the 365 Tube project located on http://365tube.codeplex.com/. Just get in touch with us through the Codeplex project page if you have further questions.   Stay tuned, Patrick

In this blog post we are going to see how to configure the Transloadit.com service for our 365 Tube project (http://365tube.codeplex.com/). Transloadit.com will be responsible for transcoding our uploaded video to mp4 and extract thumbnails from them. These videos are then stored directly on our Amazon S3 storage we created before. Hence, Transloadit.com has to know how to communicate with Amazon S3. Transloadit.com (http://www.transloadit.com) allows to create transcoding templates that process our videos like we want. After you created your account, go and create in the Template section a new template. Copy the contents of the code snippet below into the template section. Please change the “key” and “secret” values with the Amazon AWS authorization key and secret key we created before. Please also change the bucket destinations if you used a different bucket name than the names specified in our example. { "steps":{ "encode480":{ "use": ":original", "robot": "/video/encode", "preset": "iphone" }, "encode1024":{ "use": ":original", "robot": "/video/encode", "preset": "ipad" }, "thumbs":{ "use": "encode480", "robot": "/video/thumbs", "count": 6 }, "export_t":{ "use": "thumbs", "robot": "/s3/store", "acl": "public-read", "bucket": "podcastkitthumbs", "key": "your_amazon_access_key", "secret": "your_amazon_secret_key" }, "export_v480":{ "use": "encode480", "robot": "/s3/store", "acl": "public-read", "bucket": "podcastkitvideo", "key": "your_amazon_access_key", "secret": "your_amazon_secret_key" }, "export_v1024":{ "use": "encode1024", "robot": "/s3/store", "acl": "public-read", "bucket": "podcastkitvideo", "key": "your_amazon_access_key", "secret": "your_amazon_secret_key" } } } we only need the amazon access key and Amazon secret key in Transloadit.com. That means that your access key and secret keys are not exposed to end-users at all. Please save the Template id of Transloadit.com because we are going to need it in our 365 Tube project that we are going to deploy on Office 365. Before, proceeding with the next steps, you might also want to test the template configuration directly on Transloadit.com. In that way we ensure that everything works as expected when interacting with Office 365. Last but not least, we have to write down the Transloadit.com Auth key. Also this key is going to be used by our Office 365 solution. You can retrieve your authentication key by  selecting “Account Settings” –> “API Credentials” in Transloadit.com. Summary In this blog post we saw how to configure Transloadit.com to upload the 365 Tube (http://365tube.codeplex.com/) videos and thumbnails in Amazon S3. Please save the Template Id and Auth Key of Transloadit.com for the next and last configuration step.   Stay tuned, Patrick

In this blog post we are going to see how to setup the Amazon S3 account necessary for our 365 Tube environment presented on Codeplex http://365tube.codeplex.com/. As you already know, Amazon S3 will be used as cloud service to store all videos and thumbnails that are transcoded by the Transloadit.com service. Latter is used by 365 Tube to upload the videos and link them with Amazon S3, respectively. For this demo we are going to create following elements: Two S3 buckets: these buckets will store our videos and video thumbnails of 365 Tube Authentication and Security Key to upload content If you do not already have an Amazon AWS account, then register an account for free directly on this page http://365tube.codeplex.com/. Afterwards, login to the Amazon S3 console by using this link: https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/ Amazon S3 allows you to store content in containers called buckets. We are going to create a bucket for the video and another one for the thumbnail storage. You can call them with any name you like. Please consider to use lower letters and to change the names also in our future blog articles when configuring Transloadit.com. For demonstration purposes we are going to call the buckets: podcastkitthumbs podcastkitvideos With the buckets created, let us generate a security key used for the communication between the Transloadit.com service and Amazon S3. Go to the “Security Credentials” page of your account. You should see in the middle of the page a section similar to the next screen. Please create a separate access key by using the link “Create a new Access Key”. Copy the Access Key ID and the Secret Access Key. In my specific case I have the Access Key ID “AKIAJEMJTVOBLQ7XCCEQ” and secret key “kHtP34W/Nt4vFrSy3HoHRF9cYzJ9IOMbqY4r+rbD”. Save your keys because we are going to need them in the Transloadit.com service. You can create only two Access keys. You can disable them anytime (as I did J for this demonstration). Summary In this blog post I showed you how to setup the Amazon S3 account to store the video and thumbnails that we are going to process with the Transloadit.com service. Please write down the bucket names, Access Key, and Secret Access Key because we are going to need them later on.   Stay tuned, Patrick

The primary and secondary site collection owners play an important role in a SharePoint 2010 environment. They are usually the primary contacts for IT with the business users. In addition, they receive important notifications such as quota expiration and automatic site deletion notifications during the lifecycle of a Team Site. Hence, it is important to ensure that the primary and secondary site collection owners are always by e-mail reachable collaborators. This works fine as long as the collaborators have valid user accounts. Unfortunately, we encounter invalid user accounts when a user leaves a company and the IT was not informed about this fact. Usually, this is not a big deal for small companies with a limited amount of collaborator. On the other side, it becomes an issue for bigger organizations with a lot of site collections and collaborators. This blog post shows how a PowerShell script might help identifying invalid/inactive primary and secondary site collection owners by querying Active directory. It might be a help for IT staff to identify such accounts and to interact pro-actively when such an account is identified. This script is not intended for productive environments and shows only how it may look like. You have to ensure that the script is performing well in your environment. The script can be split in two parts: querying Active directory for invalid/inactive users looping through all site collections and extracting the primary and secondary site collection owner Querying invalid/inactive users The next script shows how Active Directory might be queried to identify invalid accounts. I defined an invalid account to be an account that is either deleted, expired, or disabled. The function “isValidAccount” receives the account in form of “DOMAIN\username”, queries active directory by using the “sAMAccountName” property and makes the required checks. # retrieves from active directory the user and verifies if the user exists, the account is expired, or the account was disabled function isValidAccount ($userName) { $userName = $userName.Substring($userName.IndexOf("\") + 1) $searcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher $searcher.SearchRoot = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry $searcher.PageSize = 100 $searcher.Filter = "(&(objectCategory=User)(sAMAccountName=" + $username + "))" $results = $searcher.FindAll() foreach ($result in $results){ $user = $result.GetDirectoryEntry() $expirationDate = $user.psbase.InvokeGet("AccountExpirationDate") $date = [DateTime]::Parse($expirationDate) if (($date -lt [DateTime]::Now) -and ($date -gt $noExpirationDate)) { return $false } return !$user.psbase.invokeget('accountdisabled') } return $false; } In the first line I am going to trim the account domain from the variable “$userName” because the “sAMAccountName” property in AD can be queried by using the username (see line 8). This script was tested in a single domain only. Please consider to do the necessary tests when working with multiple domains. The "$searcher" object queries the domain of the executing user. Line 11 loops through the results (should be only one record). If nothing was found, then the account was probably deleted by an AD administrator. On the other hand, if we are entering the loop statement, we are going to verify the property “AccountExpirationDate”. The next lines are important. The “AccountExpirationDate” always returns a date. It can either be set with a recent date or with the “default” value "1/1/1970". Latter is interpreted in Active Directory as the “not expired” date. We simply compare if the account is not already expired in the if statement. If so, the function immediately returns that it is not valid. Afterwards, we verify the “AccountDisabled” property and return the corresponding value. The last return statement after the loop returns always false. The reason to do so is that the account was probably deleted because no results were returned from our query. Looping through all site collections With the previous script we went through the Active Directory query and verifications. The next script is simply looping though all the site collections of a given web application, returns the primary and secondary site collection owners and passes them to the previously explained method. # specify the web application to browse through $webAppUrl = "http://lrd01sha" $webApp = Get-SPWebApplication $webAppUrl # active directory "no expiration" date $noExpirationDate = [DateTime]::Parse("1/1/1970") $allSites = $webApp.Sites # browse all site collections and check the primary and secondary owner foreach ($site in $allSites) { $primaryLogin = $site.Owner.UserLogin $secondaryLogin = $site.SecondaryContact.UserLogin if (-not [system.string]::IsNullOrEmpty($primaryLogin)) { $valid = isValidAccount $primaryLogin if (-not $valid) { Write-Host "$primaryLogin is not valid @$site" } } if (-not [system.string]::IsNullOrEmpty($secondaryLogin)) { $valid = isValidAccount $secondaryLogin if (-not $valid) { Write-Host "$secondaryLogin is not valid @$site" } } } You can change all initialization variables. It is recommended, however, to maintain the "$noExpirationDate" as it is. Putting it all together Previously we split up the different sections of the script. The next code snippet puts it all together. Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction silentlycontinue # retrieves from active directory the user and verifies if the user exists, the account is expired, or the account was disabled function isValidAccount ($userName) { $userName = $userName.Substring($userName.IndexOf("\") + 1) $searcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher $searcher.SearchRoot = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry $searcher.PageSize = 100 $searcher.Filter = "(&(objectCategory=User)(sAMAccountName=" + $username + "))" $results = $searcher.FindAll() foreach ($result in $results){ $user = $result.GetDirectoryEntry() $expirationDate = $user.psbase.InvokeGet("AccountExpirationDate") $date = [DateTime]::Parse($expirationDate) if (($date -lt [DateTime]::Now) -and ($date -gt $noExpirationDate)) { return $false } return !$user.psbase.invokeget('accountdisabled') } return $false; } # specify the web application to browse through $webAppUrl = "http://lrd01sha" $webApp = Get-SPWebApplication $webAppUrl # active directory "no expiration" date $noExpirationDate = [DateTime]::Parse("1/1/1970") $allSites = $webApp.Sites # browse all site collections and check the primary and secondary owner foreach ($site in $allSites) { $primaryLogin = $site.Owner.UserLogin $secondaryLogin = $site.SecondaryContact.UserLogin if (-not [system.string]::IsNullOrEmpty($primaryLogin)) { $valid = isValidAccount $primaryLogin if (-not $valid) { Write-Host "$primaryLogin is not valid @$site" } } if (-not [system.string]::IsNullOrEmpty($secondaryLogin)) { $valid = isValidAccount $secondaryLogin if (-not $valid) { Write-Host "$secondaryLogin is not valid @$site" } } } Summary In this blog post we mentioned how important the primary and secondary site collection owners are in a SharePoint environment. Therefore, we have also to ensure that these users are still valid users in Active Directory. With a PowerShell script we showed how to verify this. Extend the script to you needs and improve it with better reporting capabilities. Hope this helps, Patrick