OneDrive for Business Client Platform Support

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

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 sync clients for Windows (and Mac OS X, which is not shown) are in preview and are planned by early 2016. These unified clients will work only with per-user libraries hosted by Microsoft in Office 365 and consumer OneDrive; they will not work with other document libraries, such as those in SharePoint team sites, and they will not work with per-user document libraries in on-premises or partner-hosted SharePoint Server installations. The unified sync clients will also offer selective sync of files and directories, which can be valuable for users with large libraries and portable devices that have limited storage.