OneDrive Sharing Gets Even Easier

Microsoft today unveiled a new sharing experience for OneDrive on the web, simplifying the experience with more obvious choices.

“One of the best reasons to use OneDrive is sharing stuff with friends, family, and colleagues,” Microsoft’s Omar Shahine notes in a new post to the OneDrive Blog. “We recently took a closer look at how people are sharing via OneDrive, and today we’re launching a new experience that will make it even easier to work on a document together or share a new photo album.”

Previous to today’s update, when you selected Share in the OneDrive for web interface, you were presented with two choices: “Invite people” and “Get a link.” But Microsoft knows from its telemetry that the majority of people who share this way just want a link, so they’ve simplified things. Now, “Get a link” is the default choice, and the second choice has been reworded to “Email.”

Unlike the old “Invite people” choice, which “resulted in a lot of confusion and broken links … and were used less than 0.01% of the time,” the new Email link is straightforward: Just enter the address(es) and optionally choose a permission level (default is “Can edit”) and go. (And you can use the “Manage permissions” link to dive into the infrequently-used options if need be.)

To see which items in OneDrive are already shared, you can of course use the Shared view. And when you select a shared item and open the Info pane, you’ll see the familiar interface for managing permissions and adding additional people.

“Design is important and so is evidence,” Mr. Shahine writes. “To make sure the new design was doing its job, we did an A/B test with approximately 28,000 real-world users to compare its performance with the old design. As expected, the new dialog helped people more successfully share files, and resulted in more people sharing more stuff more often. Now, we’re ready to share it with you.”

Looks great.