I get asked by users all the time, “Why should my company use cloud storage?” I always respond by saying that “cloud storage is great but, you need more than just storage and that’s where OneDrive comes in. OneDrive is all about enabling people to easily share and work together from anywhere, on any device, securely”.
Over the past year, we have worked hard to bring new sharing features to OneDrive and SharePoint, including real-time collaboration for Office for Mac as well as to iOS and Android.
Today we have several announcements that reinforce our commitment to deliver a first-class experience to our Mac, iOS and Android users.
Updates to Sharing in the OneDrive Mobile Application
We consistently hear that users are more confident and comfortable sharing files when given a simple, consistent experience across their devices. Over the past year, we’ve focused on delivering that with a unified sharing experience to Office, OneDrive, and SharePoint across desktop and web.
Today we take our next step in that journey by bringing the same, successful sharing experience that you currently see in our other clients to our OneDrive app for iOS and Android.
This feature is available now for Android users and is currently rolling out for iOS users so, make sure to keep your OneDrive app updated to the latest version when prompted. If you don’t already have OneDrive mobile on your device, you can download it here.
New Updates for Mac Office Users
In January, we introduced features to Office 2016 for Mac that enhanced how teams can easily produce advanced documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from anywhere, as well as have powerful ways to search, preview, and interact with those files.
Starting this week, the OneDrive client for Mac will now be part of the Office 2016 for Mac Click-to-Run installer. This means that the OneDrive standalone client will be automatically installed as part of your Office installations rather than having to install it separately. For customers currently running the Mac App Store version, OneDrive will now automatically migrate your settings to the standalone version.
Why are we doing this? First off, we want to make getting OneDrive as easy as possible as well as you up and running quickly. Second, many customers have asked us to add the standalone version of OneDrive as it will not only automatically launch at startup but the OneDrive quick access icon will stay persistent in the Mac Finder, much the same way it does on the Taskbar for Windows users today.
Finally, this update will also bring requested functionality to the Mac OneDrive client:
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- Office For Mac will work with OneDrive to intelligently open your files locally if it has already synced the file rather than download a new copy, so your files will open much more quickly
- For our Office 2016 for Mac users, updates made to your documents will now sync only the changes (differential sync) rather than the full file each time you save, allowing you to work faster than ever.
- Files synced onto the local machine can be shared within Office 2016 for Mac with the same user experience found on all OneDrive and SharePoint endpoints so go ahead and share from anywhere.
We will announce more features and functionality coming to our customers in May at the SharePoint Conference North America. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions you’d like to see us implement, make sure to visit our OneDrive UserVoice page.