Working on the soon to appear ISG website, I was given the task of including a video segment. The original segment is a WMV weighing a good 12 MB, which is not good for web use (unless it was an hour long or something like that). So I thought to myself, “Hey, let’s use that wonderful tool called Flash and convert it into a HTTP streaming FLV!” Which I promptly did. Well it looked good on the local drive, so I throw it onto the testing server to see how it would work in a live environment. And policy strikes. At MPHI we don’t believe employees should be able to watch Flash videos apparently. Somebody must have spent too much of the workday cruising YouTube or something. So no video shows up on the testing server. I double check everything to make sure it isn’t some technical issue on my end. But after triple checking everything (and re-uploading it to the server) it becomes clear this is a policy issue and not some technical glitch. I find it somewhat amusing since MPHI has given me a video editing workstation with lots of shiny toys – I mean tools – on it. So now I get to talk to the powers above me to find out what to do about this issue.
So what’s the take-away from this situation? Carefully consider your policies and their possible effects before implementing them. And maybe create an environment where trust is fostered so that you don’t have to worry about employees watching internet videos during work hours. It will be fun explaining why we can’t have video on our site! “It’s policy, sir!”