12 Upcoming OneDrive Improvements

Vendor: Microsoft

Product: Office 365

Component: OneDrive

Date: July 2020

Target: Everyone

What's New?

“We’re excited to announce new OneDrive features across Microsoft 365 that bring a more connected and flexible files experience to business users, more control to admins, and a more personal touch to everyone at home,” Microsoft’s Seth Patton announced.

Microsoft have looked at OneDrive and have released details for a raft of improvements and benefits that will be coming in over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, there are no definitive timescales for when they will be ‘live’ to use.

How does this affect me?

Add to OneDrive. This feature is coming in public preview to business users later in July, so should be out soon. ‘Add to OneDrive’ makes it easy to add shared folders directly to your OneDrive, Microsoft says, including content that others shared with you through their OneDrive, or content that is a part of your shared library in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.

Teams sharing integration. Microsoft will begin rolling out OneDrive share integration in Teams alongside similar integration for Outlook and Office but, at the moment, there are no details on when this will be available. “When you go to share a file from within Teams, you’ll have the option to create sharing links that provide access to anyone, people within your organization, people with existing access, or specific people, including those in a private or group chat,” Microsoft says.

Synced metadata support. In the next few weeks, Microsoft is rolling out an update to the OneDrive sync app that supports read and write sync for shared libraries that contain required metadata. This will enable business users to edit content in their synced libraries while working from their desktops.

Move and keep sharing. At some point later in the summer, business users will be able to choose to keep sharing with collaborators when they move their files between different shared locations. Microsoft state that, “users will receive a new link maintaining the same permissions they had before and receive a notification about the move”.

100 GB file updates. Effective immediately, Microsoft has increased everyone’s upload file size limit from 15 GB to 100 GB in OneDrive and SharePoint. This will be useful for users with large dataset requirements.

Comment notifications. Later this year, Microsoft is adding the option to turn off comment notifications for individual files. This will only affect that one file, not the entire files library.

Address bar sharing. Those working on a file in a browser will soon be able to share links copied from their browser address bar with internal colleagues. Microsoft says, “These URLs will respect all sharing policies, empowering natural and easy collaboration within your organization”.

Sync admin reports. These reports will allow admins to check on the adoption and health of the OneDrive sync app across their organisations.

Enhanced file protection and governance. Microsoft says that admins will soon be able to implement automatic expiration of external access, multi-factor authentication policies, like prompting one-time passcodes (OTP), as well as extending continuous access evaluations to OneDrive and SharePoint.

Streamlined admin experience. Later this year, all OneDrive admin capabilities, including controls for sharing, access, sync and storage, will be available in the SharePoint admin centre. This makes things easier by consolidating admin tools in one place.

Family and group sharing. Later this month, consumers using OneDrive on the web will be able to predefine a group of people from their personal life and then share files, photos, videos and albums with that group.

Dark Mode for the web. Following in the footsteps of OneDrive for Android and iOS, Microsoft will soon bring Dark Mode to OneDrive for the web across commercial and personal accounts.

What do I need to do?

• Nothing, we'll let you know when the features become available on your Office 365 account.

References

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