Microsoft today announced a new OneDrive experience for work and school that includes both visual and functional changes to help you easily access files and keep them organized.
The new OneDrive Home experience has the new “For you” section that offers AI-powered file recommendations. Microsoft has also added rich, context-based organization, such as views that show you recent, shared, and favorite and files from meetings. The inline activity updates let you catch up on files at a glance or jump right to comments in files that you want to address. The new OneDrive Home experience is now available while the AI recommendations are coming soon.
The new Shared screen allows you to see all the files that have been shared with you in one place. The new Shared experience will roll out this quarter.
The new People view organizes your files by the people you are working with. This will help you quickly find files you’re working on together. You’ll be able to pin people to the top of the view for quick access. This experience is coming later this year.
The new Meetings view provides you with all files shared during your meetings and your meeting chats, notes and Loops. You can even see files that will be used in upcoming meetings. This new meetings experience is coming later this year.
Microsoft is adding filters that allow you to drill down to all your Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. After you filtered, you can search within that view.
OneDrive will soon allow you to change the color of a folder. This is coming later this year.
There are two new ways to manage and find important files. You can easily favorite files in OneDrive using the familiar ‘star-tap’ experience found in Microsoft 365 apps. You can add File Shortcut links to them within your existing OneDrive folders. Favorites will be available to everyone this month and File Shortcuts are coming later this year.
Microsoft is improving the unified file sharing experience. Microsoft has rebuilt the sharing dialog and it now features improved “copy link” experience. The new sharing dialog will be available later this year.
The above improved OneDrive experience will also be available in the Files app in Teams and it is expected to be available by the end of the year.
OneDrive will soon have a new option for working offline. “Available when offline” feature will allow you to go offline and continue working on files in your browser, with changes syncing automatically to OneDrive once you are back online.
With the new Open in App feature, you’ll be able to open non-Office files, such as .PDFs, .JPEGs, and MP4s, in desktop apps to view and make changes to those files. Open in App will become available later this year in OneDrive & SharePoint web and Microsoft Teams.
