What’s New in OneDrive: Improvements for Family File Sharing

OneDrive is Microsoft‘s cloud that is fully integrated into Windows 10. Microsoft offers us 15 GB free to store everything we want in it, in addition to offering us the possibility of obtaining up to 1 TB of storage if we subscribe to Office 365. Family is important to the company, and several proofs of this are the parental control functions and the possibility of sharing our Office with up to 5 members. Now, Microsoft wants to go a little further, and is going to simplify the task of sharing files with both family members and groups of users directly from OneDrive.

Although Microsoft’s goal was for users to use it only for documents, in the end it has had to change its mind and offer a cloud that works for everything. Users use it to exchange all kinds of files with each other, such as photos, videos, albums, and even entire folders. However, the file sharing options offered by this cloud were not exactly the simplest.

What's New in OneDrive:

Now, with the changes that Microsoft is about to deploy, we will mark a before and after in this function.

Sharing files with family or friends is just one click away

Windows 10 allows us to create family groups with all the members of this family. This is necessary, for example, to share Office if we have a family subscription, and also to be able to use some parental control functions.

Now, these family groups can also be used to easily share all types of files through the Microsoft cloud. To do this, all we have to do is configure our family group from this link and that’s it. When we have created it, within the OneDrive sharing options we can use the search engine to find the group of “family”, and share the files we want with them with a single mouse click.

Compartir con familia en OneDrive

And what about friends or colleagues? Microsoft will also allow us to use this new function to share all types of files with them more quickly. The difference is that instead of creating a family unit, what we have to do is create a group of friends in Outlook as explained here . Once created, we can search for the group as in the previous point to share the data directly with it.

This function will be available both for OneDrive users free with its 15 GB, as well as for those who pay some type of subscription to Microsoft 365 . Creating groups of family or friends is a completely free function.

Availability of the new OneDrive feature

Microsoft has already activated this function within the OneDrive website, although as we have seen an error appears when trying to search for a user or a group, so we will have to wait a little longer for it to be ready.

In addition, Microsoft has promised that it will bring this same feature to the OneDrive client, as well as Word, Excel and PowerPoint in mid-2021, although there is not much more information about it at the moment. Certainly a great feature that will encourage users to use OneDrive more.