Of Microsoft’s many cloud solutions, its OneDrive cloud storage service is probably the most familiar to the average PC user. OneDrive is Microsoft’s competitor to Google Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud storage options, and it serves as the primary means to share documents through Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity service.
Microsoft announced an important new feature at its recent Build 2017 developers conference, namely OneDrive Files On-Demand, which makes a user’s entire list of files available on a machine without taking up local storage space. Now, the company is introducing another significant improvement to the OneDrive service by way of a new, simplified sharing experience.
It has always been possible to share files from OneDrive, but users have needed to go to the web experience or use an app in order to send a link to file. Now, Microsoft is adding the ability to share Office 365 files directly from File Explorer on a Windows PC or from the Finder on a Mac. That’s an important addition that will let users more naturally share files without the need to work outside their existing desktop workflows.
The new sharing experience has also been simplified to make it easier to share a file or folder with specific people or to make a link accessible to anyone inside or outside of an organization. This feature includes the ability to modify permissions after they have been granted and to limit the amount of time a file or folder will be available for access.
The new experience will be rolled out for Windows 7 and 10 users, Macs, and the web this summer. The improvements join OneDrive On-Demand and a host of other new features and capabilities that Microsoft hopes will put OneDrive at the center of everyone’s cloud storage requirements.
