Microsoft is Redesigning OneDrive for Work and School on the Web

Microsoft today announced a major visual and functional redesign of OneDrive for work and school on the web that in some ways mimics the OneDrive consumer offering. But most of these updates aren’t available yet.

“The new OneDrive experience for work and school starts with the OneDrive home page and spans file experiences across Microsoft 365,” Microsoft’s Jason Moore writes in the announcement post. “It’s both a visual and functional upgrade designed to help you get to files quickly and keep your content organized in multiple ways, without you having to do any organizing. The new features and upgraded design make it faster to get to all your personal, shared, and team files in OneDrive so you can be more productive.”

A revamped OneDrive home experience is available today, but most of the new features are coming later.

For example, a “For you” section, similar to what we see today in OneDrive for consumers, will display AI-powered file recommendations at the top of the home view, for example. A new Shared view will surface those files you’re working on with collaborators; that feature is coming “this quarter,” Microsoft says. And new People and Meetings views will let you view files in context-specific ways, with both rolling out later this year.

The Recent section on the home page now lets you view all of your files, or just Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF files. But in the future, you will be able to filter the view and then search for just that type of file. Microsoft will be adding the ability to change the color of any folders later this year. Files you mark as a “favorite” in the Microsoft 365 app will appear in the new Favorites view. And later this year, you will be able to create file shortcut links throughout OneDrive.

For sharing, Microsoft is adopting the unified file-sharing experience that it uses elsewhere in Microsoft 365, with a clearer “Copy link” experience. But that won’t arrive until later this year either. And Microsoft is bringing all of these updates to the OneDrive app for Microsoft Teams … “by the end of the year.”

But the biggest changes, perhaps, are related to desktop integration: OneDrive for the web will “soon” support offline usage, and it will add an “Open in app” option for non-Office file types like PDFs, images, videos, and more, similar to what we see today for Office file formats. That’s coming “later this year in OneDrive & SharePoint web and Microsoft Teams.”

There is no word whether any of these features are coming to OneDrive for consumers, but given the shared codebases, I have to think that they will.