Yesterday, before the online demo for the ‘Quote of the Day Web Part’ officially started, Dick asked me a question about serving up media files in SharePoint. Here’s his question:

I enjoy your webinars and straightforward talk.  We discussed a media server yesterday prior to the webinar.  You told me that it would be good if I had a media server, then used SP to list the media files and let it go get them from the server.  Would you create a list, or would you use the option to load pictures as the best way to list the videos on a SP site.

I discussed with Dick the limitations of the SharePoint platform for serving media files which include limitation on file size plus the SharePoint server is not meant to handle delivery of media files. I did a quick post on that last week, How can I manage media file types in SharePoint, but I’ll expand a little on that here.

How you structure the list will be determined by how much content you have and how much time you want to allocate to management of that content.

An alternative to a Picture Library is to build a set of custom content types and associate them with a custom list. Creating a base content type for all media types and then building child content types off the base makes it possible to manage many different media types within your information structure.

The main question is, what does your client, your audience need in order to find and use your content. Once you answer that, you’ll be on your way to the correct Information Architecture for delivering your multi-media content.

Hope that gets you started.
Mark