Microsoft announced on their official Inside SkyDrive blog the latest update to their SkyDrive.com website. This update brings SkyDrive.com in line with Outlook.com to version 17.0 (Wave 6), and brings several new features to users. According to the official team blog, below are some of the changes and improvements you will see:
- Integrated view of sharing permissions
SkyDrive.com now unifies all sharing-related information and tasks for a particular file or folder into a single pop-up screen. An example screen is shown below:
In our own testing, this doesn’t actually bring any additional functionality to the sharing options, however it did remove the previously (quite useful) shortcut to remove permissions by simply hovering your mouse over the person’s name and click on the “X” (now it requires two clicks to remove). - Improved selection gestures for touch-based devices
For touch-base devices such as the Microsoft Surface, the updated SkyDrive.com now allows users to select an item or multiple items by swiping the item to the left or right (in Thumbnail view). Previously, tapping on an item will open the file or folder directly, to select an item or multiple items the user must use the Detail view’s selection boxes in order to do so.
- Improved drag-and-drop support
Given that SkyDrive.com doesn’t display the folder hierarchy in the left-hand navigation column, whilst it supports drag-and-drop users can’t easily move an item up a folder hierarchy. The new update now allow users to drag-and-drop items using the “breadcrumb” bar along the top. An example is shown below:
The official team blog also mentions several under-the-hood changes to SkyDrive to improve speed and reliability. However, we have also noticed that Windows Live Groups has now been fully integrated into SkyDrive.com. As part of this change, users are no longer taken to a separate page to view the “Group profile”, as we have covered earlier, and features such as the Group’s “Messenger social” feed and discussions feature have been discontinued. Users can still download past discussion messages by selecting Group actions > Download discussions.
This update has yet to bring new features such as the cloud music player to SkyDrive.com. However, it’s great to see the SkyDrive team bringing much more frequent updates to the service. Well done!