Microsoft’s SkyDrive got some improvements and updates, a blog post on Inside Windows Live outlines. SkyDrive is a personal cloud storage and offers 25GB of free storage for users to store and share documents, files and photos. The improvements include sharing Office files with one click, powerful tools to manage and organize files quickly. Collaboration tools to connect with friends from other email services as well as from Facebook and LinkedIn. Apart from this now files can be uploaded to SkyDrive using HTML5 capabilities.
SkyDrive now makes it easy to share documents with friends, users using Web Office products can directly share the file with friends using the share option with in the document, earlier this is not possible. Now users can share each file with in a folder without worrying about the folder structure. This type of sharing works with Office documents, photos or any other file type. The sharing process is simple, just click the share link and enter email addresses, or post the link to social networks, alternatively you can send a link to other users. Now users can share with any other email service users to send files for free.
File management in SkyDrive is also improved with new options:
- Create folders inline
- Rename a folder inline (or by hitting the F2 key)
- Move, delete, and download multiple files in bulk
- Move and copy very easily with an inline pop-over dialog
- Use right-click functionality on documents and photos to take action right away
- Create an Office document quickly. When you click one of the Office document icons, all you have to do is name the document, and then you can immediately launch into the Office Web Apps.
Microsoft has also introduced drag and drop functionality for SkyDrive using HTML5 API, this allows users to upload files and photos by drag and drop. Modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 10 and Safari all support this functionality. Earlier Microsoft relied on Silverlight technology for uploading the files. With this new feature users can browse while uploading, as the uploading is done in the background.
This release also includes rebuilt photo slideshows that are faster and better. When viewing an album you can now click “View folder” and return to the folder of the album and see captions right below the photo. Now there is support for touch APIs in Internet Explorer 10 and Mobile Safari for navigating photos with swipe.
These updates would have been added long back to SkyDrive a free online file storage service. It’s competitors Dropbox and Google are in fast pace and particularly users love Dropbox. SkyDrive is online for more than 3 years without much user adoption, these improvements may help to get more users for the service, but there is a long road ahead for SkyDrive to catchup with Dropbox.
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