Microsoft today announced a major revamp of the OneDrive web version, this revision is mainly for work and study users, some features are similar to the OneDrive consumer version, but most of the new features have not been introduced.
The new OneDrive experience for work and learning starts with the OneDrive home page and encompasses the file experience across Microsoft 365,” Microsoft wrote in the announcement post. It’s a visual and functional upgrade designed to help you access your files quickly and keep your content organized in a variety of ways, without you having to do any organizing. The new features and upgraded design give you faster access to all your personal, shared and team files in OneDrive, resulting in increased productivity.”
The revamped OneDrive home page is already available, but most of the new features are still in development. For example, the “For you” section, similar to the current OneDrive consumer version, will display file recommendations provided by artificial intelligence at the top of the home page view. A new “Share” view will show files you’ve worked on with collaborators; Microsoft says this feature will be available “this quarter. The new People and Meetings views will let you view files in a context-specific way, both of which will be available later this year.
The “Recent” section on the home page now lets users view all files, or by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF file category. In the future, users will be able to filter the view and then search for specific types of files. Microsoft will also add the ability to change the color of any folder later this year. Files that users have marked as “favorites” in the Microsoft 365 app will appear in a new “favorites” view. Later this year, users will also be able to create shortcut links to files in OneDrive.
For sharing, Microsoft is adopting the unified file-sharing experience used in Microsoft 365, with a clearer “copy link” experience. But this feature won’t arrive until later this year, either.
Microsoft will also bring all of these updates to the OneDrive app in Microsoft Teams by the end of the year.
Perhaps the biggest change has to do with desktop integration: OneDrive Web will “soon” support offline use and will add an “open in app” option for non-Office file types (such as PDFs, images, videos, etc.). This feature will be available “later this year in OneDrive and SharePoint Web Edition, as well as Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft did not mention whether these features will be pushed to OneDrive Consumer Edition but given the shared code base.
