There"s been a steady stream of news from Microsoft"s Ignite 2018 conference this week, and it"s not over yet. The firm has announced an array of features coming to OneDrive.
Most of the macOS features have been already covered, but among them, there"s a completely revamped sync client. It now supports Files On-Demand and the macOS Mojave dark theme. It"s also getting SharePoint support, so you can easily log into a SharePoint server, and sync files just like you would with OneDrive, including Files On-Demand and everything.
While the macOS OneDrive client was probably the biggest news, there"s quite a bit more on the way. For one thing, you might have noticed that camera upload has been working differently over the last few weeks. It now creates folders for you in your OneDrive based on the year and the month that the image was captured (rather than the date that it was uploaded). Theoretically, you could remove all of your pictures and re-upload them, but Microsoft has assured us that there"s a tool coming that will make the sorting process easier without doing all of that.
Camera upload is finally coming to OneDrive for Business as well, something that has been asked for for some time now. In fact, Microsoft says that a third of all new OneDrive features are based on user feedback.
Also coming to OneDrive business customers is video transcription. You"ll be able to upload videos, and they"ll be automatically transcribed - and those transcriptions are searchable as well. Now, you can not only search in OneDrive by objects in the image, but you can also search for something that someone said in a video.
There are more collaboration features too. By hovering over a file, you"ll be able to see who opened it, and soon you"ll be able to see things like how many times the file has been opened and the average amount of time that it was opened. This is something that will arrive to the web app, but it"s also coming to mobile applications.
On mobile, you can now rotate 3D objects that are in view. Large PowerPoint presentations are getting loading improvements now, where they"ll be loaded a slide at a time. In other words, you won"t have to wait as long to view a big presentation.
Office Lens is already built into the mobile OneDrive clients, but a new thing that you"ll be able to do is edit the metadata on the file when you upload it to OneDrive.
Finally, there are some improvements to file sharing across the board. You"ll now be able to create a link and control who can open that link. Previously, you could create a link and set an expiration date, but anyone with the link had the ability to open the file. Now, you have more control. It"s not going to ask the user to sign into a Microsoft account to open the file; instead, it will send a confirmation code to the user"s email if they"re not signed in.
Some of the features mentioned above are rolling out this week, while others will be available in the future.