Microsoft Announces Major Updates to OneDrive for Business

The Microsoft OneDrive team recently announced significant updates to its storage plans for Office 365 Business customers. Recently the company made drastic changes to its storage plans for its consumer OneDrive service that limited plans to a 5 GB option only. The OneDrive Team did a mea culpa by reversing some of those decisions with some modifications. It also made similar announcements for the business side of OneDrive.

Organizations using premium business subscriptions such as Office 365 E3, E4 or the new E5 Plan, will once again see the return of unlimited storage. Microsoft will be using a phased approach starting at the end of December. If you are running one of Microsoft’s other Office 365 business subscriptions, you won’t see any changes to your current 1 TB plan.

Changes to OneDrive Storage Plans for Office 365 Business

Storage plans

Office 365 customers on our premium Enterprise, Government and Education plans will receive OneDrive for Business unlimited storage. Specifically, this includes unlimited storage for individuals in organizations with more than five people subscribing to one of the following plans:

• Office 365 Enterprise E3, E4 and E5
• Office 365 Government E3, E4 and E5
• Office 365 Education
• OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2

We will begin rolling out increased storage to these customers by the end of this month, starting with an automatic increase from 1 TB to 5 TB per user. We expect this rollout to complete by the end of March 2016. After this point, customers who want additional storage can request it as needed by contacting Microsoft support.

Currently, Microsoft provides OneDrive as a business and consumer services. OneDrive for Business is built on old SharePoint technology that can trace its lineage back to the Groove collaboration platform Microsoft bought back in 2005. The company also announced the availability of a next generation sync client, and it is now available for deployment. A significant part of the announcement is the availability of a business client for OS X finally. Mac users can now access data on Microsoft’s enterprise content management system, SharePoint. Previously this was limited to Office for Mac desktop apps or directly accessing SharePoint through a web browser.

Next Generation Sync Client for Windows and Mac

After a successful preview program, we are happy to report that the OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client is now available for deployment. Our top priorities for this release were improved reliability and performance, as well as delivering core capabilities such as selective sync, support for large files up to 10 GB in size and removing the 20,000 file sync limit. For IT Professionals, we’ve provided the ability to silently deploy and configure the client on behalf of your end users.

The new OneDrive client will be available before the end of December with support for Windows 7, 8 and 10, but devices running Windows 8.1 will have to wait until somewhere around the first quarter of 2016. OS X systems are running 10.9 or later will have access to the new client at the of December also.

The mobile side of things also got some welcome updates introducing support for Microsoft’s recently released Windows 10 Mobile OS. The update supports viewing, editing, deleting, sharing and uploading files onto both your personal OneDrive and OneDrive for Business storage. The OneDrive app for Windows 10 Mobile will have to wait a little longer for offline files support, unlike the OneDrive iOS app that finally got it through an update.

There is even more beyond these announcements; you can check out the OneDrive blog post for further details, but the improvements and changes over the past week show that the OneDrive Team is listening and working to make sure customers have a great experience no matter the platform they are using.