Microsoft OneDrive is at the core of your files experience in Microsoft 365, storing and protecting files as well as powering sharing, collaboration, and discovery. As outlined in Unveiling the Next Generation of OneDrive, OneDrive helps you find and organize all of what’s important to you in Microsoft 365, and offers new governance and controls and creation tools.
Meet the OneDrive app for Teams
We are excited to bring these enhancements to Teams with the new OneDrive app for Teams. The OneDrive app will soon replace the Files app in Teams, giving you consistent and familiar file management experience across all of Microsoft 365. The new OneDrive app takes advantage of all the recent updates made to OneDrive and SharePoint library experiences, bringing you the benefits of performance improvements, new views, and feature enhancements in OneDrive.
The OneDrive app will rollout to new Teams in December 2023. To get started, flip the toggle in the upper-left corner of the classic Teams app to new Teams. Once done, you’ll notice that the OneDrive app now appears in place of Files app in the left-hand navigation. The new enhancements to the OneDrive experience in Teams will roll out to classic Teams in early 2024 with the Files app name unchanged. Additionally, there is no change at this time to the Files app on Teams mobile.
Discover and act on relevant content
The new OneDrive app gathers in one place all the files, Loops, dashboards and design boards you need to work on, no matter where they live in Microsoft 365. The app makes it easy to get back to all the content you’ve created as well as those shared with you across Microsoft 365, right from Teams. The new views and filters enable you to quickly find relevant results, making your file management experience more effective. For example, if you are looking for a specific content but can’t recall the specific chat where the file was shared or the name of the file itself. Simply go to the OneDrive app located in the left rail navigation bar and browse through your files. Use the filters to browse the files by people, file type, or meetings to quickly find the file you were looking for.
Let’s take a closer look:
- OneDrive home: With OneDrive you can find your recent files and other content such as Loop, Lists, Power BI, or Whiteboard – no matter where they are stored in Microsoft 365.
- For you: This section at the top of the OneDrive home page shows you AI-powered file recommendations with thumbnails and file activity updates.
- Shared view: Any file that’s been shared with you, regardless of if it was shared in a chat, channel, meeting or email, will show up in the shared view. It’s your go-to spot to find all the files on which you are collaborating.
- Meetings view: The meetings view shows your upcoming and past Teams meetings, along with meeting recordings and shared files. Whether these files were shared in chat or the meeting invite, you’ll find them all here.
- People view: Sometimes you don’t remember the name of a file or the specific chat where a file was shared, but you do remember the person who shared it. Context is vital when looking for the right file. The people view organizes your files by the people you work with.
- Favorites: Keeping track of important files is now easier with favorites. You can mark any file as favorite, then access it from your favorites list across OneDrive, Teams, File Explorer, Microsoft 365 apps, and more.
- Recycle bin: Without leaving the Teams client now you can easily view and restore previously deleted files.
Third party cloud storage apps for Teams
With the introduction of new capabilities to the OneDrive app for Teams, access to your files in 3rd party storage services in new Teams will require the corresponding Teams app for that service. These apps can be found and downloaded by tapping the Apps icon in the left rail of Teams. We are working closely with 3rd party cloud and content management providers to expand the range of available apps built for Teams.
At the same time, we continue to enhance Teams platform with deeply integrated experiences and greater IT and end-user controls to enable a seamless collaborative experience on content that is stored on 3rd party cloud platforms. For example, Teams includes turn off native file upload policy, and auto install approved apps in Teams, and (coming soon) a new admin control for setting the default content app for local files uploaded using drag-drop.
Learn more about OneDrive
Want to learn more about OneDrive? Download the OneDrive Quick Start guide. Additionally, IT Admins can sign up for OneDrive Customer Office Hour to join a monthly meeting where our product team will answer your questions, demo new features, share our plans, and get your feedback.