Blog Post

Microsoft OneDrive Blog
10 MIN READ

Unveiling the Next Generation of OneDrive

jasmo's avatar
jasmo
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 03, 2023
OneDrive has come a long way since it first launched as a cloud storage provider. OneDrive is now the center of your files experience in Microsoft 365. It goes beyond storing and protecting files. It...
Updated Oct 10, 2024
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jaysmith_91's avatar
jaysmith_91
Copper Contributor
Jul 18, 2024

OneDrive has completely forgotten about metadata

  • As a person who uses Sharepoint, I need all my file metadata to be preserved in the transfer between Sharepoint and OneDrive.
  • As a person with thousands of photos, I need all my camera and photograph metadata to be imported, shown, and managed in OneDrive, so that I can sort, filter, and update my files.
  • As a person who uses Windows desktop, I want all my metadata preserved and searchable when moving from desktop to OneDrive.
  • As a person who cares about personal knowledge management, I need my cloud storage solution to support metadata.

I'm told OneDrive was built based on SharePoint. So why are there no custom fields? Why are there no custom views using metadata filters? This seems like a glaringly obvious oversight on the part of Microsoft. Much more significant to user experience than AI trinkets.

 

Folders are not good practice for document and data management

Ask literally any Sharepoint consultant or information architect worth their weight in salt about folders versus metadata.

  1. Folders is an archaic way to manage information; like relying on files within filing cabinets. They're slow to navigate, and rely on the user having an existing and complete mental model of the folder hierarchy.
  2. Everyone uses folder names as arbitrary metadata fields and arbitrary tags, with no real taxonomy, resulting in inconsistent and sprawling folder branches.
  3. Files within folders are not searchable based on these folder names, and still not easily filterable based on those folders.
  4. In folders, files get lost and hidden away.
  5. In folders, files get duplicated; because rarely are all folders across a file management system mutually exclusive ways to categorize data, and also because we probably don't know whether an imported file was already included in one of the sub sub sub folders or across many thousands of existing files.

Enable metadata in OneDrive

Allow the user to add custom columns. Allow the user to create custom Views. Allow the user to conditionally format based on that metadata. Implement these things in the same way you have implemented them in Sharepoint, so that I can use these same features at work and at home.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-managed-metadata-column-8fad9e35-a618-4400-b3c7-46f02785d27f?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us