What you need to know
- OneDrive turns 15 years old this month, and Microsoft has a bunch of new features to celebrate the occasion.
- A new OneDrive Home experience will roll out over the coming months that includes a refreshed Recent view, an Activity column, and support for pinning document libraries to the Quick access section.
- Microsoft is also working on an intuitive sharing experience across Office apps, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
OneDrive turns 15 years old this month. In its decade and a half of existence, the cloud storage platform has had many names, interfaces, and updates. Now, Microsoft has announced (opens in new tab) its next wave of plans for OneDrive. The service will gain a new OneDrive Home experience, an updated collaboration experience, and a new way to share content with friends and family over the coming months.
Microsoft redesigned the OneDrive Home experience with resuming work in mind. It features an updated Recent view that supports sorting files by type. For example, you can click on the Word button to locate .docx files or the Excel button to see .xlsx documents.
A new Activity column in OneDrive shows the most recent, unseen edits, and comments for documents. That Activity column also appears in the My files view, which shows @mentions, comments, and assigned tasks from collaborators.
OneDrive also gained support for pinning document libraries to the Quick access section to simplify navigation.
OneDrive Home should roll out in the “coming months,” according to Microsoft. The updated landing experience for OneDrive for the web will ship to OneDrive for work and school users.
Microsoft 365 apps that work with OneDrive all now feature a consistent experience for collaboration. Microsoft started this journey (opens in new tab) back in June 2021. The company has also built a unified file experience that extends across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft also shared details about its new OneDrive photo story experience. The company recently started testing the ability to share a private feed that only appears for people that have received an invite — think Instagram Stories but for a specific group of people. It’s available now in Australia on OneDrive for Android and iOS as well as within web browsers. It should roll out to the United States and other regions in 2022.
