15 years ago Microsoft introduced OneDrive, originally as SkyDrive until SkyTV took them to court. The cloud storage service has gone from strength to strength, becoming more integrated with Windows and Office, and becoming increasingly feature-rich.
It is therefore appropriate that Microsoft celebrates this milestone with a new slew of features, which are listed below:
Introducing a new OneDrive Home experience
Video description: Introducing a new landing experience for OneDrive for web.
Microsoft has redesigned the OneDrive Home experience to help you easily resume your work and catch up on what you missed while you were away. Soon, OneDrive will surface your most relevant files and list your most recent files along with any activity updates, so you can see everything at a glance and quickly prioritize where to start working.
Microsoft has evolved the Recent view to OneDrive Home. This will ensure that in the morning—or whenever your workday begins—you can easily find the files you need to work on first. Do you have a product launch guide to wrap up or a customer roadmap you’ve submitted to your teammates for feedback? Now you can filter by file type (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, and .pdf) using the buttons at the top of the Recent file list. Simply select the Word button to navigate to that launch guide and complete the finishing touches.
Video description: Filter your recent files by type. Stay up to date with the most recent activities on your files.
Through OneDrive, you can access all the collaboration tools that help you and your team deliver high-quality results like threaded comments, @mentions, real-time coauthoring, and highlighted changes. To ensure you are always up to date with these actions, Microsoft is introducing an Activity column in OneDrive that surfaces the most recent, unseen edits, and comments on your shared documents.
The Activity column also appears in the My files view, showcasing all the shares, @mentions, comments, and assigned tasks from collaborators, so you can see which reviewers have provided remarks for you to address.
For example, if you’re working with your team on a white paper for a new product release, you can review the Activity column to see any edits or comments that require your attention or anyone you need to remind to address action items.
Finally, to easily find and access the places where you continually work, you can pin document libraries to the Quick access section in the left navigation of OneDrive Home.
OneDrive Home will be available in the coming months. This new landing experience on OneDrive for web will roll out to OneDrive for work and school users.
A familiar, consistent experience across all your files
Microsoft is dedicated to providing a coherent collaborative files experience across Microsoft 365 with OneDrive. This is why Microsoft has been working on delivering a more intuitive sharing experience across Office apps, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams that provides you a quick, robust way to grant access to information, set granular sharing controls, see everyone you’ve shared files with and manage access settings across individuals and groups.
Figure 2. Coherent and intuitive sharing experience across Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft has also created a familiar files experience across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams, so you can quickly locate the files you work with on a regular basis to share them with colleagues. Whether you’re browsing, moving, or copying files in OneDrive or Microsoft Teams channel, adding shortcuts to your OneDrive from a document library in SharePoint site or Teams, or accessing your Teams standard and private channel files—your experience will be coherent and consistent.
Figure 3. Add shared folders to your OneDrive for easy access directly within Microsoft Teams.
A new way to share your memories
Since 2007, OneDrive has been committed to giving you peace of mind knowing your photos, videos, and files are protected in the cloud, and now Microsoft has extended that commitment to a refreshed photos sharing experience to relive a lifetime of memories.
Figure 4. Share and relive your beautiful moments with OneDrive photo story.
OneDrive photo story, recently made available in preview, brings all your memories into a private, invitation-only feed that you can share with family and friends. It supports comments, reactions, and notifications to spur authentic interactions through photos that people care about. The feature is available now in Australia on the OneDrive mobile app for Android and iOS, and from your favorite web browser. Microsoft plan to roll out the new feature in the United States and other regions later in 2022, as Microsoft continue to listen to your feedback and develop and improve feature capabilities
Microsoft says they are committed to bringing you features that protect your important files and memories and securely connect you with those who matter most.
