Major overhaul of OneDrive for Buiness - includes selective sync

Microsoft have announced a major overhaul of their OnDrive for Business service, promising some much awaited features.

The following is taken from the OneDrive  Blog https://blog.onedrive.com/e.com/ : 

Rock-Solid Sync

Starting today, we’re launching a preview of the next generation sync client (NGSC) for organizations. The preview client adds OneDrive for Business connectivity to our proven OneDrive consumer client. The new client (available for both PC and Mac) offers improved reliability and selective sync, as well as removing the 20,000 file sync limit and extending support for files up to 10GB in size (these limits will remain for the duration of the preview but be removed when we launch broadly). For IT we’ve also included the ability to silently deploy and configure the client on behalf of your users.

We want everyone to have a great preview experience, so we’re rolling it out in stages to manage high demand and to make sure the setup experience is smooth and reliable. We’ve set up a waitlist website for you to reserve a place for your organization. When the preview is ready for your organization, we’ll send you an email with all the instructions on where to download it and how to set it up. Learn more here.

Simplified browser experience

We’ve completely refreshed the browser experience, employing the best practices from our OneDrive consumer experience used by millions every day. The resulting browser experience is clean, intuitive and beautiful. A highlight of the new browser experience is the ability to switch between a list and preview tile view which makes it easy to identify key files. All of the key actions you want to take on a file or folder, such as preview, edit, share and delete, are conveniently located on the toolbar or by right-clicking a specific file or folder. This new browser experience makes managing your work files easier than ever. Learn more here.

Enhanced sharing

You could always share your files with anyone inside or outside your organization, but now we’re giving you more flexibility in how you do this. We’ve added new sharing options such as letting people you’ve shared with invite others in your organization to the file or folder as well as the ability to set an expiration date on a sharing link when you need greater control. Learn more here.

 

Mobile productivity

There are significant new enhancements to the mobile apps. Starting with Android, you will be able to take files offline! You can flag one or more files for offline access and then open these files when disconnected, ensuring access to your files wherever you may be.

There are some cool new features in the iOS app as well! There’s a new streamlined way to trigger common actions on files (share, move, delete and details) simply by pressing and holding on the file you want to use. We’ve also added PDF annotations – the ability to draw, highlight and comment on your PDF files – directly in the OneDrive app.

 

We know great mobile productivity is essential, so you can count on us to keep adding features to all our apps to ensure you can do anything with your OneDrive files on your phone or tablet regardless of whether you are online or not. Learn more here.

Protecting your people and data

Of course, providing a great user experience is vital to driving adoption of any file sync and sharing solution like OneDrive for Business, but this can’t be at the expense of ensuring that IT can stay in control of corporate data. To help IT in this area, we’re delivering new controls to manage how files flow outside your organization, including auditing external sharing invitations and limiting which users can share externally. In the coming weeks, we’ll preview a feature that enables limiting the external domains your users can share with. Learn morehere.

New developer opportunities

We want developers to be able to build rich apps that integrate with OneDrive (both consumer and business). Previously we made announcements about preview support for OneDrive for Business in our unified OneDrive API. Today, we are starting to roll out this OneDrive API for production use. Learn more here.

Meet the new OneDrive for Business today!

Today marks tremendous progress but we aren’t done. With OneDrive for Business we’re all in to continue meeting and exceeding your expectations. In the coming months we’ll share even more about the innovation coming across every aspect of the service.

Get started today with the new OneDrive for Business and give us your feedback on UserVoice.