Purpose
To find ways around large organisations' bans on staff accessing to the YouTube video clips.
The easy way:
The
best way to do this is to persuade your organisation to make an exception so that members of your team are given permission to access Youtube, Vimeo, Google Docs and Picasa (where most of the multimedia content is hosted, and then accessed by the manual.)
The problem that you
may have is that your IT Dept is mixing its technical/facilitating role with a MANAGEMENT role. (Most definitions of the role of an IT dept is that it is there to make IT work for the benefit of the organisation.) If members of your team were to access
inappropriate material or to
waste the hours they are being paid to work by watching tedious or crass videos instead, then this would be a
management issue, and should be dealt with accordingly by line management. Asking for a technological fix for human behaviour is not great management, and not very 21st century!
The harder way: permissions for each individual YouTube clip
This is a bit fiddly, so you I suggest that you ask your IT dept to do this for you if this is what is being asked for!
Note that everytime a new videoclip is added to the manual (and we hope that lots of new video will be being added!) they will have to go and make a new exception - which is a drag. Many large organisations, including in the NHS, are now beginning to grant blanket permission for certain users to access Youtube, etc, and then managing infringements in more grown up ways.
There is some good material in the manual about marshalling this kind of argument for senior managers in an organisation: see
Organisational support for the technology to run TiddlyManuals.
If in spite of all this the organisation still insists on approving each individual video clip then this is how to find the URL's (that is the web address that the IT system will have to enter into their system to "Allow" it):
1. Go to
Videos - this page has all the video content listed as sub-topics find this when you click the "
Show references and info" panel.
2. Open each page with video embedded in it, and then get the URL for that filmclip as follows:
3. Within each embedded youtube screen on the page there are buttons that will appear when you mouse over the screen. These allow you :
(a) to minimise the film screen and reveal beside this the "URL" for that bit of film (select and copy it!), or
(b) to "watch this film in YouTube" which opens the youtube page in a separate tab or window (which also gives you the URL - select and copy it.)
4. Give a list of the YouTube clip URL's to your IT department. Warn them that you will be supplying them with a regular supply of new URL's as new video continues to be added.
But...
Obviously if you were to try to do this yourself at work you would struggle as you can't get the films to show! But there is still a way...
5. You need to
Log in and then switch the manual to
Edit mode.
6. Open up a page that has video in it, and click the Edit button to "open the hood" of that page to look at the workings...
(tip: NB - IF YOU DO THIS, THEN WHEN YOU CLOSE THE PAGE UP AGAIN, USE THE X, RATHER THAN THE TICK, SO THAT YOU "UNDO CHANGES TO THIS TIDDLER" - that way the system doesn't assume you have been busily editing your content and log all the pages you do this with as different versions from the core manual)....
7. Once you are inside the workings of the page, what you then look for is a bit of gobbledegook code that will be placed where the video window occurs in the page. This is what we call an iFrame - it consists of two lumps of code that sandwich the URL and tell the page to make a window and to show the URL inside it. It will look something like this:
<html><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="https://youtube.com/v/jlmDRbXttcw?hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://youtube.com/v/jlmDRbXttcw?hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></html>
8. All you have to do now (I warned you it was fiddly!) is find the URL and copy it out of this - it will always start with
http:// and will always be bracketted with speech marks - I have highlighted this one:
<html><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="https://youtube.com/v/jlmDRbXttcw?hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://youtube.com/v/jlmDRbXttcw?hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></html>
I hope that is helpful. Many large organisations are now making YouTube and Facebook, etc, open to all their staff, which is felt to be more respectful, and does not change the fact that if there is evidence of misuse then this is may be evidenced easily enough with help from the IT dept, and then managed through line management. That way IT gets to do what it is good at, and managers too...