Microsoft has provided me with a response to some of the questions and requests people had for the SkyDrive team. As it turns out I didn’t exactly choose a great time to run this project for SkyDrive as we have seen more developments to the service in the past few weeks than we have ever seen before. This has meant many of the questions and requests that were put forward to Microsoft were redundant. Microsoft had already addressed many points in the recent update to SkyDrive and by releasing of two dedicated SkyDrive apps for Windows Phones and iOS by the time they were reading through the feedback from the readers.
I have to say that some of the questions and requests that were put forward by readers of Liveside were superb and I am looking forward to future products that I do this project on to see what other things people want to know. I sent Microsoft a document with well over 60 different questions and requests for SkyDrive, you can view the entire list online (on SkyDrive).
Sadly the combination of the updates and new apps and also Microsoft’s reluctance to release any significant news about its plans for SkyDrive the response back from Microsoft was not particularly enlightening at all. Below are the 3 responses from Microsoft I received about SkyDrive:
Questions
Q. Any dedicated mobile SkyDrive apps?
A. As you know, on Tuesday 13 December, the SkyDrive team announced the release of the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone and iPhone. With these applications, customers can:
- Browse their entire SkyDrive – documents, photos, any and all their files
- Share any SkyDrive folder or file with one or more people
- Manage their SkyDrive by creating folders, deleting and organizing their files and folders
Requests
Q. API to bring SkyDrive/Mesh into third party application for automatic backup.
A. We recently announced an update to the Live Connect APIs and Live SDK which helps developers use SkyDrive in their applications for Windows, Windows Phone and other platforms.
Q. Option drag the objects into folders?
A. As part of our updates focused on improved sharing and file-management, the SkyDrive team introduced drag and drop as a way to upload files and photos for browsers that support HTML5 File API like Internet Explorer 10, Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari. And while your files are uploading, you can continue to browse and use SkyDrive. You no longer have to sit and wait for uploads to complete.
I expect, like me, you are a little disappointed with the lack of feedback from Microsoft this time around, when I focussed on Hotmail it was far more informative. Even though we might not have gotten much out of Microsoft I still found the focus on SkyDrive to be very useful.
Personally I think some of the questions people have so far had about Hotmail and SkyDrive have been very interesting and should definitely be shared with the community. Equally, even if Microsoft don’t want to talk about the requests that I have sent them they are certainly reading that list, it will be interesting to see how many of the requests are implemented in a future update to SkyDrive.
Seeing as better folder controls in the web version of SkyDrive and mobile apps were the top requests for SkyDrive I’d guess that with the recent update and release of apps many of the Liveside readers will be pretty happy with SkyDrive at the minute. With more user input I guess SkyDrive can continue to get better.
I am interested to know what people think about this feature even if the information we get back from Microsoft is very restricted. I am very keen to continue this project as I think it is providing some excellent content from the Liveside readers and even if the requests only influence a small part of SkyDrive in the future surely this would have been worth running.