Microsoft has officially unveiled the next generation of OneDrive, which is set to bring the cloud storage solution more closely in line with the rest of the company’s offerings, including Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and Outlook.
The company is calling the upgrade “the future of file management,” and rather unsurprisingly, the Copilot-branded AI tools are making an appearance across the board.
With trillions of files already hosted on the platform, Microsoft hopes that the change will make it easier for workers and individuals to access, share, and collaborate on files.
OneDrive is getting a mid-life makeover
It has been years since OneDrive got its last major redesign, and this latest one aims to bring it more in line with the rest of the company’s portfolio by introducing a clearer UI.
Despite some layout tweaks, navigation across the primary OneDrive interface remains familiar with menus like Home, For You, and Shared, all available.
A new People view aims to make it easy to find files when you know who shared it, but can’t quite figure out what it was called, and a new Meetings view plays home to meeting recordings and attachments.
Microsoft says that there are now fewer clicks involved with sharing files, which has become a problem not just for OneDrive but for other cloud storage platforms as well, as more sharing options have become available over time.
Other upcoming features include the ability to open directly into more apps beyond standard Microsoft 365 programs, and the closer integration of OneDrive into Teams and Outlook where many users find themselves sharing files the most.
Redmond also says that users will be able to “ask open-ended questions related to an individual file or get a summary of the content” across OneDrive and SharePoint thanks to system-wide AI integration, among plenty of other Copilot-branded tools.
The full announcement is available on Microsoft’s website, and it’s likely that the company may produce even more documentation about the changes soon.
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