Recommendations for displaying Videos on Atlas

Since Microsoft retired the Stream web parts from SharePoint Online we have been asked how we recommend displaying Video content on Atlas. Microsoft were expected to provide a replacement web part but as of the time of writing nothing has been provided, so we have come up with an Atlas-based solution for our users in the interim.

Please note that you will need to have at least Atlas 4.2 to follow these steps, and Atlas 4.3 or 5.0 to configure the "Modal Window" setting.

Use an In Focus Everywhere web part to return Videos

For this scenario we will leverage the In Focus Everywhere web part and the "Modal Window" capability.

• In Atlas 4.2 or 4.3, add an In Focus Everywhere Results (Atlas) PREVIEW web part to your page,
• In Atlas 5.0+ add a Documents (Atlas) web part to your page.
  
  
• Configure the web part to use "SharePoint Search" as the Data source:
  
  ...then choose the "Atlas: Documents" result source in the SharePoint Search section (after choosing it will be shown as "Documents (Atlas):
  

This will return all documents matching the tags of your current page. Next we can filter the results to only return video formats, for which usually just MP4 will be sufficient, but you'll need to verify the format(s) of the videos you intend to show. Videos from Stream and Teams meeting recordings will be MP4 files.

• In Atlas 4.2 or 4.3, add an In Focus Everywhere Filters (Atlas) PREVIEW web part to your page,
  • In Atlas 4.2 you'll need to modify the Query Template, removing the {verticals.value} token so you only have the {searchTerms}, then click Apply below the box:
    
• In Atlas 5.0+, add a Documents Filters (Atlas) web part to your page.
  
  
• Next, connect the Filters web part to the Results web part, and vice versa, connect the Results back to the Filters, both from the Connections section of their configurations.
• In the Filters web part, under Document Format, filter the results by "MP4":
  
• You will now see only Video results in the Results web part. If you also want to filter the Videos by a specific tag such as a Subject or Department, you should also select that filter before continuing. You should see that the results being returned are the results you expected based on the tags.
• In the Results web part configuration panel, under the SharePoint Search section, you will find an empty box with a button underneath which reads "Apply selected filters". Click this button and you should see the box populated similar to this example:
  
• Now that you have the filters applied to the Results web part you can remove the Filters web part from the page entirely. This will leave you with just the Results web part showing only the results you want.
  
  
• Now that you have the right results you can consider changing the Layout and Item Styles in the Results web part configuration panel to get the experience you want for users. The decisions you make here are largely down to your preferences, except for one specific setting that we heavily recommend using.
• In Atlas 4.2 you will simply have to let the videos open using their default behaviour. The recommended change for Videos in Atlas 4.3 and later is to have them open in a Modal Window when clicked. This can be set in the Layout section of the configuration panel:
  
• Now when you click on a result it will open in a window on top of the current page, rather than navigating the user away from Atlas to play the video in Stream. The video will play immediately, and can be closed using the X in the top right to return to the page you were already on: