OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – December 2020

[Ankita Kirti]

On behalf of the entire OneDrive team I would like to wish each and everyone of you a happy and healthy new year ! And to begin this new year on a happier note I am glad to share some really cool features released during the holidays. 

Here are the latest functionalities that rolled out to production in the month of December-2020.

• Full fidelity shared libraries in OneDrive web
• Create shared library in OneDrive web
• Exclude specific files from sync

Create shared library in OneDrive web

Roadmap ID: 67163

OneDrive connects you to all your files-be it your individual work files or your shared team files. We’re updating the existing experience of creating new Shared Libraries from OneDrive on the web to make it simpler and easier to create collaborative spaces. The new streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group, allowing you to specify the people you want to share with – and the new shared library appears immediately as a new content collaboration space for your team files.

Create shared libraries from directly within OneDrive on web.

 

Full fidelity shared libraries in OneDrive web

Roadmap ID: 49093

Along with the ability to create a shared library from within OneDrive we are also making it easier for you to access the content in these shared libraries . Not only can you sync these shared libraries from SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to your PC or Mac using OneDrive, you can now view shared libraries with full fidelity from within the OneDrive on the web. This means you can create new documents, pin important ones to the top, add shortcuts to your OneDrive, create views, manage metadata, share and more. 

View, access and manage shared libraries from within OneDrive on web.

 

Also, Learn more how to find team files from your shared libraries from within the OneDrive user interface.

Exclude specific files from sync 

Roadmap ID: 66188

Admins! You can now specify a file name or file extension you’d like to exclude from sync at the device level. This setting lets you prevent the OneDrive sync app (OneDrive.exe) from uploading specific files to OneDrive or SharePoint.  No errors appear for the skipped files, and the files remain in the local OneDrive folder.

So now as a part of "Known Folder Move" if you need to move a Desktop folder which might consist multiple shortcut files , just add .lnk files to the list of the excluded files and prevent them from syncing.

End users will be notified about the exclusion in the activity center and will be able to recognize these files with "do not enter" status in the File Explorer.

End user notification regarding the excluded files. This change is visible to end users via a new excluded icon and will not result in a red X error. 

 

In File Explorer, the files appear with a "do not enter" icon in the Status column.

You can find the new setting in the admx/adml files that ship with OneDrive version 20.201.

• If you are currently using the admin center setting to block certain file types from being uploaded from the OneDrive sync app, you will need to first enable this new setting, make sure it's applied by restarting the OneDrive sync app, and then disable that current setting in admin center.
• If you enable this setting, the sync app will not upload new files that match the rules you specified. There is no impact on existing files uploaded to OneDrive and SharePoint.

Learn more: Exclude specific kinds of files from being uploaded

Learn more and stay engaged

As you can see, we continue to evolve OneDrive as a place to access, share, and collaborate on all your files in Microsoft 365, keeping them protected and readily accessible on all your devices, anywhere.

You can stay up-to-date on all things via the OneDrive Blog and the OneDrive release notes.

Check out the new and updated OneDrive documentation.

Take advantage of end-user training resources on our Office support center.

Thank you again for your support of OneDrive. We look forward to your continued feedback on UserVoice and hope to connect with you at Ignite or another upcoming Microsoft or community-led event.

Thanks for your time reading all about OneDrive,

Ankita Kirti – Product Manager – OneDrive | Microsoft

[HotCakeX]

"Exclude specific files from sync"

this is a very useful feature in my case

[Red Flag]

Regarding „Exclude specific files” – will this setting be showing up soon under Administrative Templates in Endpoint Manager? It doesn’t shown there yet. It would help in cloud only scenarios.

[wroot]

Office 365 group? Really? :)

[AlphaSeb]

Does not work for me. RSOP shows the setting to be applied. Restarted OneDrive, Restarted Windows, still shortcuts are beeing synced. OneDrive 20.201.1005.0009

[Monir]

The Shared Library in OneDrive will now even confuse people more on when to use OneDrive vs SharePoint team site vs Teams. 

OneDrive meant to be storing users’ personal work related files and not for storing  team/departmental files and an user’s OneDrive gets deleted after 30 days by default once the user leaves the company (His/her AD acct gets deleted). And their all files are gone after that time period. So imagine the nightmare if that user had shared team/departmental documents in his/her OneDrive. It’s troublesome MS does not specifically mention in this type of communication that OneDrive is primarily meant for storing personal work related documents. 

[Monir]

In addition to my comments above...

The Shared Library mentioned above,  when gets created is from another brand new SharePoint team site that gets created, the Library is just mapped to show in user’s OneDrive.  So this is another huge problem for enterprises as sites can be created left and right (provided users are allowed to create O365 Groups) and causing nightmare managing all these sites and content and on top of that  they all consume a shared pool of storage. So not good.

This Shared Library creation (really a full blown SharePoint team site) should be gone from OneDrive. OneDrive should be just used for storing users work related personal files and they can share if they want to when needed. 

[JHerschel]

Hello, will there be any plans to increase the OneDrive Sync limit to more than 300k files?  Also, when users click ADD SHORTCUT TO ONEDRIVE, does the content inside these folders count against the 300k limit?

[Jesper Lauridsen]

@Ankita Kirti What ever happened to roadmap item 49093 and 67163??? Were they abandoned?

All the best,

Jesper Lauridsen