Microsoft OneDrive Blog

6 MIN READ

Innovations in OneDrive for collaboration, intelligence, and control

Microsoft

Apr 21, 2026

Last year, we made a promise: your files should work for you, not the other way around. That meant reimagining OneDrive not just as a place to store files, but as an intelligent layer that surfaces what matters, eliminates busy work, and enables seamless collaboration across your organization. OneDrive became smarter, more collaborative, and more central to how work flows across Microsoft 365.

This spring, we're delivering what's next.

As OneDrive brings together intelligence, collaboration, cross-platform experiences, and enterprise control and governance, it helps you move work forward from the first file to the final outcome. That’s the idea at the center of this year’s innovations: helping individuals and teams move from file to finished faster, with greater clarity and confidence that their work is protected and ready wherever it happens.

Let’s take a look at what you can benefit from today with OneDrive.

Understand and act on your content

Agentic AI for files in SharePoint document libraries

Late last year, we introduced the AI Actions button in document libraries, giving you faster ways to find content, get answers, and take action on files with AI. In March, our AI in SharePoint release made it possible to use natural language not just to understand content, but to build and manage the systems around it, from pages and lists to libraries and structured document workflows. Today, we’re building on that foundation with new capabilities that help organizations capture shared context, create reusable skills for multi-step workflows, and generate documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and other structured outputs from content already stored in SharePoint. Together, these capabilities help you find the right content, understand it more quickly, organize it more effectively, create new deliverables from it, and share it with greater confidence.

Ask SharePoint to create documents from files saved on your site

AI experiences at work in OneDrive

Currently generally available, OneDrive brings AI directly into your everyday file experience. With the Copilot icon in OneDrive, you can instantly summarize documents, presentations, PDFs, and images, ask questions about your files, compare versions to spot what changed, recap meeting recordings, and extract key details from whiteboard images. Across capabilities like PDF review on the web, OCR on mobile, semantic search, and Ask Copilot in File Explorer, AI is helping users get to the right content faster, understand it more quickly, and take action without leaving the flow of work.

Copilot icon in OneDrive for Web experience

Markdown support in OneDrive and SharePoint

Now rolling out to general availability, Markdown file support is now in OneDrive and SharePoint, making it easier for you to create, view, and edit .md file content alongside the rest of your documents, without leaving your browser. Learn more in our blog here.

View, create, and edit .md files in OneDrive and SharePoint

Review PDFs with Copilot in OneDrive and SharePoint for the web

Copilot is now generally available in the OneDrive and SharePoint PDF viewer. Select text, right-click, and use AI actions from the context menu. You can also write your own prompt if you have a specific question.

OCR for PDFs in OneDrive mobile

Optical character recognition (OCR) is now built into OneDrive for Android and iOS mobile apps to help you reuse information, speed up document workflows, and make content easier to find. Learn more here.

OCR for PDFs in OneDrive mobile

Offline search on OneDrive mobile

With offline search on iPad, you can quickly find files you’ve made available offline by searching by filename, even without an internet connection. Whether you’re reviewing documents on a flight or between meetings, you no longer need to manually browse through downloaded folders to locate what you need.

Semantic search in File Explorer on Copilot+ PCs

With semantic search¹ on Windows, OneDrive users can now find their files by describing what they're looking for rather than remembering exact file names, whether those files are stored locally or in the cloud. OneDrive makes this possible by surfacing both semantic photo results and lexical document matches from across your entire OneDrive library, right from File Explorer.

Semantic search in File Explorer on Copilot+ PC

Ask Copilot in File Explorer

With the new Ask Copilot hover icon on File Explorer Home, now available in public preview for Windows Insiders, you can get AI insights on any of your recent OneDrive files. Your local and cloud OneDrive files show up natively in File Explorer Home, so Copilot is ready to summarize content, pull key details, or draft an email when you need it.

Ask Copilot in File Explorer

Simple and secure collaboration

Hero Links

Last year, we announced the Hero Link, a single link that controls access to your files, so you can quickly share content and clearly understand who has permission to view, edit, or reshare. Coming this summer, this updated sharing experience makes collaboration easier and gives you more control with a single, unified experience to both share and manage permissions.

The new sharing experience to share and manage access in a single place

Transfer ownership improvements

New updates to the transfer ownership experience help teams maintain continuity when someone leaves the organization. Rolling out to general availability in the coming weeks, managers can filter files by shared status, move content while retaining existing permissions, and take action using an updated email notice.

Improved transfer ownership helps retain sharing permissions and continuity of collaboration

Updated document library experience in SharePoint

We've refreshed the SharePoint document library to make it easier to find, organize, and act on your files. Custom views and filters are now readily available, and a simplified command bar puts your most-used actions within reach. View customization, including conditional formatting and metadata-based organization, lives in a single, streamlined menu.

Updated document library user experience in SharePoint

Stay in the flow of your work, wherever you are

Sync support for up to 1 million items on Windows

Now in public preview, OneDrive Sync now supports syncing up to 1 million items on Windows devices, helping teams manage large document libraries and shared content at scale without compromising access across devices. This preview requires the OneDrive Insiders ring, additional hardware requirements², and recommended configuration settings. Devices that don't meet these requirements continue to sync at the existing 300,000-item supported limit with no disruption.

Visual refresh for macOS

We introduced a refreshed OneDrive sync experience on macOS, with a redesigned activity center and updated system dialogs that feel native on Mac. Built with technologies like SwiftUI, it aligns with modern macOS Liquid Glass design language and provides a cleaner, more responsive way to check sync status, recent activity, and issues that need attention. A simplified layout surfaces the essentials first, with more detail available when you need it. Read more about the new experience here.

OneDrive Sync activity center on macOS

File previewer refresh for iOS

With the new file previewer in OneDrive for iOS, users can view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in app - no downloads required - with Microsoft 365 security and compliance enforced.

Refreshed file previewer for iOS

OneDrive command to move a local-only folder to OneDrive

You can now right‑click a folder in File Explorer and move the entire folder to OneDrive, preserving its structure and making it easier to back up large sets of files.

Move local folders to OneDrive

Custom OneDrive folder name GPO to help address max path issues

To reduce Windows file path length issues, IT admins can now set a custom name for the local OneDrive sync root folder on users’ devices. Now generally available, this policy lets organizations define a shorter, organization‑specific folder name while keeping the OneDrive experience consistent for users. The display name shown in File Explorer and the OneDrive Activity Center remains unchanged. There are other max path improvements on the way, so stay tuned!

Custom OneDrive folder name GPO

Keep everything protected and in control

File-level archive in SharePoint

File-level archive in Microsoft 365 Archive lets organizations archive individual files in active SharePoint sites, moving inactive content to lower-cost storage without disrupting the site, now in public preview.

Admin policy for expiring “People in your organization” links

Security and usability must go hand in hand. With the new admin policy for expiring “People in your organization” links, you can now enable your users to collaborate and ensure that access gets cleaned up automatically. Configure expiration timeframes that align with your organization's data governance requirements, whether that's 30 days, 90 days, or a custom period.

Built with the OneDrive community

The updates shared here reflect our continued investment, shaped by years of partnership with our community, in making OneDrive the solution for your Microsoft 365 files needs, enabling individuals and teams to work and collaborate with confidence.

Thank you to our customers, partners, and community members who continue to share feedback and shape what comes next!

Stay in touch with the team: