Ignite 2017: OneDrive for Business New Features and Enhancements

Written by Vendor
September 28, 2017

The OneDrive for Business team shared several new features that are coming to their sync client, some of which are in preview beginning this week, that expand the services ability to give users enhanced access to their cloud storage data.

We are here at Microsoft Ignite this week in Orlando, Florida along with almost 25,000 attendees to hear the latest from Microsoft on the productivity, cloud, machine learning, and AI fronts.

We expect various product announcements to come out during the remainder of the week in product side sessions and will give you a quick debrief on each one as they arrive.

What Was Announced

OneDrive for Business Updates – Theses enhancements will enable users to hare and collaborate easier using cloud based storage and change business processes to be more efficient with secure and easily accessible sharing tools. See this announcement article over on the OneDrive for Business OneDrive blog for a complete rundown. Some of the big ticket items from the list include:

— OneDrive Files On-Demand
— Auto-Configuration/Silent Synch with Microsoft 365 Powered Devices
– Secure external sharing to users without a Microsoft Account
– User experience updates across mobile and web interfaces
– Updated OneDrive Admin Center
— Self Service Migration Toolkit
– File Restore

Why It’s Important – You can sum up why these features are important with one word – cloud. As more organizations are making the move to cloud based services, whether in a hybrid or full shift to the cloud, the ability to easily access, work with, and securely share those files is critical to the user experience. While many of these new features are well received by users, the one that has really caught my attention is File Restore.

This feature gives users the self-service ability without intervention from the IT department to restore file(s) from the last 30 days right down to the second they were created. As threats to our data continue to proliferate the reality is not if we will be the target of an attack but when it will happen. If it does occur and files are corrupted and synched with OneDrive for Business then the user will be able to go back in and retrieve clean copies of those files that exist before the attack and corruption occured.

My one desire with File Restore is that it ultimately arrives on the consumer version of OneDrive because that is a customer base that could make use of that for sure.