A feature that is growing in popularity among cloud storage options is, sharing. As more people move their lives to the cloud, cloud service providers are quickly adapting the many ways users can access and share their treasure chest of content. Features once reserved for enterprises such as co-owning, co-sharing, and cloud sync are now becoming everyday tools of casual users. Each passing day, more people are getting the hang of using Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox or iCloud to share content.
Unfortunately, OneDrive was among a handful of cloud storage providers who lacked offering the basics when it came to sharing. Previous attempts at sharing or co-authoring a folder resulted in a convoluted mess of steps and permissions, ultimately ending in a disjointed and out of sync experience for users. As Microsoft has been hard at work at making OneDrive a viable Educational and Enterprise solution, the OneDrive team has been keeping a close eye the shifting needs of users.
In a forum hosting 352 comments specifically about OneDrive’s inability to match competing cloud storage systems options for sharing, Jason Moore, the Group Program Manager at Microsoft chimed in to offer long overdue news.
Hi, all –
I’m excited to let you know that we’ve begun rolling out Shared Folder Sync on OneDrive. We can’t wait for you to start using it!
How does it work? We have a new action on OneDrive, called “Add to my OneDrive.” Whenever you are using OneDrive on the web, or through the mobile app, you’ll see this when you are browsing content that others have shared with you. Clicking “Add to my OneDrive” will add that folder to your OneDrive. From then on, whenever you browse your OneDrive, you’ll be able to see any of the shared folders you’ve added. And on the sync client, when you select what folders to sync, you’ll see all the shared folders you’ve added. Select the shared folder(s) you want and they’ll immediately begin syncing to your PC or Mac.
We’re rolling this out which takes some time, and of course you may get it before your friend who also wants it (try not to rub it in). Shared Folder Sync is available on Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista and MacOS. Windows 8.1 users will need to upgrade to Windows 10 to get this feature. Note that you’ll only be able to sync shared folders where you have Editor permissions.
Moore does not clarify if this feature will find its way over to OneDrive for Business, or if there will be encryption associated with the folders, but for now, this update should satisfy the more basic use cases OneDrive users were running into when attempting to share folders.
