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OneDrive for Business update on storage plans and Next Generation Sync Client

By Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for OneDrive and SharePoint as written on blogs.office.com

Today, I’d like to share an update on our OneDrive for Business storage plans, the availability of our Next Generation Sync Client and several other new capabilities we’re delivering in our December update.

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.

Customers on all other Office 365 Enterprise, Business and standalone plans that include OneDrive for Business will continue to receive 1 TB of storage per user. While customers on these plans will not receive the full unlimited benefit, we expect it will serve the vast majority of users. Today, most OneDrive for Business users consume significantly less than 1 TB.

Overall, we have taken too long to provide an update on our storage plans around OneDrive for Business. We also recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations. We are committed to earning your business every day by delivering a great productivity and collaboration service and improving our communication approach.

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 OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client is available for Windows 7, 8 and 10 (8.1 support will be added in the first quarter of 2016) and Mac OS X 10.9 and above. The Windows client is available today with the Mac client being available before the end of December 2015.

With this first release, the Next Generation Sync Client supports OneDrive for Business only, but we will add support for SharePoint document libraries in future releases. In the interim, if customers require sync for both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint document libraries, the Next Generation Sync Client is designed to work side-by-side with the existing sync client.

Additionally, we are actively working on other important features including Office integration to support the co-authoring of documents and sharing scenarios (planned for the second quarter of 2016), as well as a more seamless experience for users who are migrating from the existing sync client (planned for the first quarter of 2016).

Mobile updates

In addition to updates on our desktop offerings, we have several improvements for our mobile apps. First, we recently released a new OneDrive app for Windows 10 Mobile. This app offers all the essential capabilities to view, edit, delete, share and upload files onto both your personal OneDrive and OneDrive for Business storage services.

Users can easily manage their files and folders on their Windows 10 Mobile device.
A range of required actions such as view, edit, delete and share are available for the user.

We are also happy to announce the OneDrive for iOS app will support offline storage. You can selectively flag files for local availability and open them when disconnected. The updated app will be available before the end of December 2015. We first released offline storage on Android in September 2015 and will take this same capability to Windows 10 Mobile in the second quarter of 2016.

You can select one or more files to take offline.
All offline files can be accessed through a single view.

Lastly, Office Lens for iOS now supports uploading your content directly into OneDrive for Business. Office Lens is essentially a mobile scanner that lets you to take pictures of printed documents, business cards, expense receipts and even whiteboards, with automated cropping, trimming and searching of those images. We will add OneDrive for Business support to Android and Windows 10 Mobile in the first quarter of 2016.

Use the whiteboard capture feature to store all meeting notes in OneDrive for Business.

Access whiteboards, business cards and photos quickly and easily.

New capabilities for developers

We are also releasing exciting new value for developers. First, we created a new OneDrive for Business API that allows developers to programmatically access OneDrive for Business files. The API includes support for thumbnails, search, large file upload and sync changes. Developers can write directly to the OneDrive for Business API or access it via the Microsoft Graph. We also provided new tools and SDKs for Universal Windows, iOS and Android—including support for simple “file picker” integration that enables import and export of OneDrive for Business content. Finally, we released an updated preview of a JavaScript Picker SDK for web app file management. All developer tools and documentation can be found on the new OneDrive developer portal.

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