At a session today during Microsoft Ignite, the OneDrive team announced several upcoming innovations slated to be released later this year and in the coming months. Some of the most noteworthy features include a cleaner web user interface, universal cross-platform sharing, and more.
We begin with the user experience updates. Here, Microsoft is making the OneDrive web UI cleaner and more intuitive. Seen in the featured image above, the new UI is designed to be faster and more responsive. Users will see the impact of their work, and effortlessly find what they are looking for. Some other changes to the UI include bolder folder and file names, and seeing who has accessed content thanks to a new People Card and info pane.
Next up is universal cross-platform sharing. Microsoft is updating the sharing UI, and standardizing sharing across Windows, Mac, and Web. This experience is also coming to Office 2016 in the next few months and a sync client will be installed as part of the Office for Mac installation process. Finally, along with support or Zip files, there will also be new mobile and desktop notifications which will allow users to see when shared files are opened or changed.
As is expected, the OneDrive team also announced that OneDrive Files-On-Demand will be generally available on October 17th. Pairing with this, they also announced that Windows 10 users with RS3 will be able to preview file types using the OneDrive app, similar to how it currently is on the web app.
Some other noteworthy tidbits, mainly aimed at IT admins, from the announcements can be seen in the list below. You can check the full list by visiting this website.
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory Authentication Library will now support silent sync and account config for OneDrive.
- Combining the power of Windows AutoPilot with Windows 10 RS3, Exchange Online w/ Office Click to Run and OneDrive Files On-Demand with ADAL, we showed how an IT admin can provision a fully powered PC over the air without any physical interaction with the device.
- We will now fully support the synching or DRM/IRM libraries in OneDrive.
- We will soon be supporting support external sharing with out the need for a Microsoft Service Account (MSA) by allowing you to use Azure to create a one time use passcode to grant external users access to content.
- We will now support the country specific location of user’s data to specific Azure region, helping our customers to better support country specific security and standard’s needs.
- Service Level Encryption with Customer Key- This allows customers to hold their own private key to their cloud storage
- Now you can see active accounts, file activity and view all OneDrive Message Center messages right from the OneDrive admin console.
- We are releasing a migration toolkit for self-service users looking to migrate from share drives or other cloud based services to OneDrive on their own.
These features are all welcome, and will definitely help both the average consumer and the IT professional. There is more news to come from Ignite 2017, so keep it locked right here to OnMSFT for all the OneDrive news and information.
