OneDrive for Business Client Platform Support

OneDrive for Business technology enables file access, sharing, and synchronization with diverse clients and servers, but capabilities vary by platform. The most important OneDrive for Business clients (top) and the types of document libraries and capabilities they support (left) are summarized here.

The OneDrive for Business client for Windows PCs offers the most extensive capabilities, including sync, which automatically copies a user’s local document libraries and offline changes to the server when the client is online, and then updates the user’s other devices with these changes. New unified synchronization clients for Windows (and Mac OS X, which is not shown) were released in early 2016. These clients will work only with Per-User libraries hosted by Microsoft in Office 365 and consumer OneDrive, as well as with other document libraries, such as those in SharePoint team sites in on-premises or partner-hosted SharePoint Server installations. The unified synchronization clients also offer selective synchronization of directories (but not files), which can be valuable for users with large libraries and portable devices that have limited storage.