DENVER, Feb. 21, 2012 — NewsGator today announced a new way for organizations to bring enterprise video delivered by Kontiki into Microsoft SharePoint, consolidating all of their enterprise content onto a single collaboration platform.

Kontiki’s Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) helps organizations deliver high-quality live video webcasting, video on-demand and community video portals over their existing networking infrastructure. Companies such as General Motors, Nestle, Wells Fargo, Ernst & Young, Starwood, Sephora and Equinix have used Kontiki’s solution to foster an engaging video culture.

Bringing Kontiki’s patented video delivery technology to Microsoft SharePoint establishes the collaboration platform as the single, central go-to resource for enterprise content. This new capability results directly from the deep integration of Kontiki’s EVP and the NewsGator Social Sites 2010 social computing suite, which delivers a wide range of social and mobile computing capabilities for Microsoft SharePoint.

The integration enhances productivity and business performance by significantly streamlining employee information access. Organizations no longer need to spend time and effort navigating to a separate environment to find, share and manage videos.

“Microsoft SharePoint offers opportunities for organizations to increase productivity, and those opportunities are magnified by Microsoft partners, such as NewsGator, that create solutions to further collaboration,” said Richard Riley, SharePoint product management director at Microsoft Corp.

Socializing video
In addition to consolidating content on Microsoft SharePoint, the integration makes Kontiki-delivered video more social, enabling users, through Social Sites, to post, share, “like” and comment on Kontiki-delivered video in Social Sites activity streams, communities, video repositories and internal TV channels. The result is an enterprise-grade video experience that is secure, internal, and business-oriented, maintaining a video experience akin to the public YouTube.

“Many global organizations are demanding high-quality enterprise video for a growing number of use cases and need to include this important content within their SharePoint environments,” said Kevin Crayton, Kontiki’s Vice President of Products. “NewsGator Social Sites is their fastest path to social video integration with SharePoint and lets companies leverage all the power, efficiency, security, manageability and analytics of our proven video platform. It’s a winning combination which our customers have been looking forward to with huge interest.”

“High-quality enterprise video that can be delivered to every employee across a global company is one of the most personal, engaging and effective ways for a workforce to communicate,” said NewsGator Brian Kellner, VP of Development and Product Management. “To obtain the most value, great content should be easily accessible and in the mainstream of the social business flow. That’s what we’re doing with this integration, and the business results will speak for themselves.”

Kontiki support is part of the Social Sites Video Stream module for Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

About Kontiki, Inc.
Powered by innovative technology, Kontiki pioneered the enterprise video platform and enterprise content delivery networks, providing superior cloud-based content delivery across the enterprise. Kontiki’s video solutions enable consumer-grade video engagement with enterprise-grade control over video delivery for the world’s largest companies, including American Airlines, Wells Fargo, Nationwide and Nestle, serving nearly 1.5 million users worldwide. Kontiki offers organizations the unique ability to globally deliver video on demand or live broadcasts to 100% of their employees, regardless of location, and to the full range of today’s business devices, including smart phones and tablets, without congesting networks or compromising video quality.

About NewsGator
As a Microsoft Gold Certified and Depth Managed Partner, NewsGator is helping over three million paid users in industries across the globe propel the future of productivity. NewsGator Social Sites delivers robust social technology to the enterprise with proven scalability and security to flagship clients like Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army. No other social software vendor can rival our deep integration with the entire Microsoft stack – reducing your total cost of ownership while increasing adoption, collaboration, and innovation. And for all that, Microsoft honored us as its 2011 US Partner of the Year. We’re making SharePoint and Office365 social. Follow us on Twitter @newsgator and at www.newsgator.com

Customers and partners: Please join us at the 2012 NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting, March 6-8, 2012, at The Ritz-Carlton, Denver. Come together with colleagues, peers, industry thought leaders, and technologists – all motivated by a common purpose of reaping the benefits of enterprise social computing.

When dealing with real-time live streaming, IT has to make sure that the network and all of the connecting WANs are able to get the bandwidth they need to deliver content to everybody involved without having to deal with latency or dropped data packets. Such performance disruptions will cause the stream to fail, creating major operational issues.

Essentially, IT needs to plan for a significant bandwidth spike directed at specific users. The network also needs to be configured to sustain this spike for the duration of the event, routing other traffic to alternate destinations if possible.

Real-time streaming requires specialty compression, content delivery and other delivery tools, but the burden on the network is relatively short-lived and IT typically has time to plan for such an event. As a result, organizations may not want to permanently configure their networks to handle a large streaming function, but instead develop them with enough flexibility to can be adapted to meet this need.

The effects of not using video, however, are much more difficult to solve. Communicating internally through video messages can be far more effective than written memos, handbook amendments and emails, as the video content is inherently more approachable and understandable.

The reasons for this are simple; video allows the employee to use vocal tone, body language and other key techniques to get the subtleties of a message across in a way that is difficult to accomplish with other forms of communication.

Furthermore, a growing number of people are simply becoming more comfortable and accustomed to watching video through the internet and mobile devices. Because of this, companies that deliver high-quality video content can engage workers in a more meaningful way. This not only pays off in terms of productivity, but also in recruitment and employee retention.

Video has the potential to completely revolutionize the way businesses communicate internally, supporting everything from training initiatives to streamed broadcasts from management. The problem is that most business networks are not designed to handle just any form of video content.

Traditionally, workers used the network to access data, applications and other similar services. If the system dropped a data packet or experienced latency, it meant the employee needed to wait a few seconds or perhaps refresh a page to get to the information needed.

In the case of enterprise video delivery, latency and dropped data packets can cause an operational failure, making the content unwatchable until the network catches up.

This kind of performance disruption, which most networks are designed to allow, can completely derail business streaming services. In response, organizations need to upgrade their infrastructure with enterprise content delivery network systems and other similar solutions designed specifically for video.

This issues is especially prevalent for organizations depending heavily on enterprise video systems, using the content format for employee training and engagement. Video can quickly use all of the WAN's bandwidth, leading to significant latency, dropped data packets and other performance disruptions.

To overcome this challenge without having to sacrifice the gains of consolidated IT architecture, companies can invest in enterprise content delivery network systems. This technology supports business video streaming plans by compressing content during transmission, allowing it to reach end users without needing as much bandwidth.

Using video is rapidly becoming more popular among businesses of all sizes because the content format is uniquely suited to engage employees. This makes it easier to manage a distributed workforce because it helps managers reach employees in a more meaningful way than emails, handbooks and other similar internal communications.

According to the news source, the content plan will begin with efforts to identify the best practices for mobile security before compiling them into easily understandable and entertaining content that can be distributed through business video streaming technology.

Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer at HHS's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, told GovInfoSecurity the goal of the content will be to distribute key information pertaining to mobile security in an accessible format.

"The good practices materials will be communicated in plain, practical and easy-to-understand language through different media formats, such as videos and quick tip sheets," Pritts told the news source.

Using video content to train and engage workers is rapidly becoming a popular tactic in the enterprise as well as government. Businesses working to develop such systems need to make sure they invest in enterprise content delivery network solutions and other similar tools that will help them overcome the network delivery-related challenges associated with video-based programs.

As businesses use such robust systems to improve operations and engage employees, they often find that the video content saps their bandwidth. This leads to dropped data packets, causing streaming content to stop working. For most network tasks, a dropped data packet just means that the information gets to users a little more slowly. But when dealing with video, such performance issues can be a serious nuisance.

The problem is that most businesses cannot afford to simply add more bandwidth to deal with video. Furthermore, business video streaming functions will usually use that bandwidth anyway, creating the same problems companies had before the upgrade.

Instead of focusing on the internal infrastructure when handling video, organizations should use an enterprise content delivery network. In such a setup, video can be compressed during transmission, minimizing the amount of bandwidth it needs to reach end users without disruption.