Panopto Brings Video to Salesforce

SEATTLE(12 May 2015)

Panopto, a leading video platform provider for enterprise and education markets, today announced a new release of its video capture and management software. The latest update includes an app for recording, managing, and searching video content within Salesforce. The release also introduces the first specification for universally describing and sharing video from any media source. Today’s announcement builds on Panopto's recent launches of SharePoint and Jive apps, helping organizations share video within the software and portals their employees already use.

Video for CRM and Sales Prospecting

Organizations increasingly rely on video to improve communications with current and future customers. Sales teams use web conferencing software to interact with clients and prospects. Marketing teams embed video presentations in prospecting emails. Customer service teams demonstrate solutions to problems using screen recordings. 

As video continues to become an intrinsic part of customer and prospect communication, there is a growing need to integrate CRM systems with video platforms that are built for the unique requirements of capturing, sharing, and managing rich media.

In response to this need, Panopto is launching a unique app that enables organizations to manage and share video content directly from within Salesforce. Using the app, organizations can:

• Securely log in to Panopto using existing Salesforce credentials and single sign-on (SSO)
• Attach videos and playlists to Salesforce accounts, opportunities, and cases
• Embed video content into emails sent through Salesforce
• Launch the Panopto recording and webcasting software from within Salesforce
• Federate Panopto Smart Search and Salesforce search results
• Upload and share videos of any size from within the Chatter activity feed
• Automatically transcode videos for playback on any device 

“Salesforce is becoming the preferred hub for customer interaction, and video is becoming the preferred medium for high-impact communication,” said Eric Burns, CEO of Panopto. “With the new Panopto app for Salesforce, marketers, salespeople, and customer service teams can increase satisfaction and drive growth by easily communicating with their customers using video.”

The Panopto video app will be available from the Salesforce AppExchange at no cost to Panopto customers.

A Universal Specification for Capturing Video

In recent years, the proliferation of video in businesses and universities has led to fragmentation in the video capture market. As screencasting, video recording, and live broadcasting tools continue to enter the market, and as the trend toward user-generated video continues to accelerate, many organizations struggle to manage media assets that are scattered across individual desktops, file shares, and internal portals. Without a way to standardize, catalog, and share these assets, they often remain undiscovered in content silos.

To address this growing challenge, Panopto is introducing the Universal Capture Specification. The spec is a simple, XML-based format for describing video files and collections so that they can be centrally managed and streamed to any device. It is the first open format for describing media with any number of feeds and metadata, from simple audio and video files to complex, multi-stream presentations and event recordings. The specification’s unique support for audio, video, slides, attachments, captions, timeline events, and metadata goes beyond existing standards by providing a vocabulary for describing any media regardless of its source. This level of fidelity is critical for cataloging and sharing business presentations, university lectures, and live events in an archival format.

The Universal Capture Specification is supported in Panopto’s video content management system, enabling video capture, web conferencing, and videoconferencing vendors to export media assets in a standard format and ingest them directly into Panopto. Videos ingested into Panopto are then automatically indexed for search and transcoded for playback on any device using HTML5 and the HLS protocol.

Schema and documentation for the spec can be found on Panopto’s website at http://panop.to/universal-capture.

Improved Group Management and Sharing

The latest Panopto update includes a collection of new features that help businesses and universities manage access and permissions at scale:

• A Groups dashboard for easily accessing and managing group permissions
• Batch import and creation of new groups
• Batch sharing of videos and folders
• Automatic permissions inheritance for new folders
• An intuitive new sharing interface for controlling access to videos
• Unlisted videos, which are hidden videos accessible only by direct URL 

These sharing and group management features are part of Panopto’s ongoing commitment to enabling organizations to scale their video platform deployments quickly and efficiently.

About Panopto

Panopto’s mission is to help anyone share knowledge using video. Since 2007, the company has created software that enables businesses and universities to create searchable video presentations in minutes from any device. Privately held, Panopto was founded by technology entrepreneurs and software design veterans at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. For more information, visit http://www.panopto.com