OneDrive File Upload Size Increased, Sharing Improved, Security Enhanced

Kicking off July, the OneDrive team is announcing a wide variety of updates to the service that includes increased file size uploads, improved Teams integration, and a lot more. All of the features in this post are rolling out in various phases and should be available for your tenant in the near future.

  • Add to OneDrive – This new feature makes it possible to add shared folders to your own OneDrive. This is going to make it a lot easier to keep track of where you are saving files and make navigating to the content significantly easier.
  • Teams Sharing Integration – Rolling out soon is an improved sharing experience inside of Teams that matches what is used in OneDrive, Outlook, and other Office apps. This feature will enable the ability to easily create links that can be shared within your org or specific people in the chats.
  • Synced metadata support – Rolling out in a few weeks, is an update to the OneDrive sync app supporting read and write sync for shared libraries that contain required metadata. This will enable business users to edit content in their synced libraries while working from their desktops.
  • Improved Sharing Permissions – As files move from conception to completion, they often will move to broader shared cloud libraries. Once this feature is rolled out, when you move those files, document permissions will travel with the document with links auto-updating which should significantly reduce the “can you please let me edit this doc” requests.
  • 100GB file updates – this one is simple, you can now upload significantly larger documents from the previous limit of 15GB to the new limit of 100GB; this change impacts both OneDrive and SharePoint.
  • Comment notifications – you will soon be able to turn these off for individual files but this functionality won’t arrive until later this year.
  • Address bar sharing – If you access or work on a file in a browser, you will soon be able to share links copied from your browser address bar with your internal colleagues (if admin-enabled). These URLs will respect all sharing policies, allowing for easier collaboration within your organization.
  • Sync admin reports – Provides visibility and insights on the adoption and health of the OneDrive sync app across your organization. This new dashboard allows you to check sync app versions, sync status, and top sync errors on individual devices.
  • Enhanced file protection and governance –  Admins will soon be able to implement automatic expiration of external access, multi-factor authentication policies, like prompting one-time passcodes (OTP), as well as extending continuous access evaluations to OneDrive and SharePoint

All of these updates will be rolling out at various times in the weeks and months ahead but considering this is the first day of the new fiscal year for Microsoft, the OneDrive team is wasting no time letting everyone know their upcoming features.

As this new functionality arrives, we will keep the site updated with best practices about how to use features like the admin reports and file protection functionality to help you get the most out of your Office 365 subscription.