OneDrive for Business Roadmap Update

OneDrive for Business, a service that delivers file sharing and synchronization across platforms and devices from Microsoft-hosted or on-premises file storage, is introducing several features that are in preview or rolling out. These features improve the synchronization experience, bring more features to mobile clients, and integrate more closely with other Office 365 components. By themselves, these changes could improve user productivity. However, new features work first (and sometimes only) with Microsoft-hosted OneDrive for Business storage, and some features will require active Software Assurance (SA) to work with on-premises SharePoint Server file storage.

Improved Synchronization, Administration in Windows Client

Microsoft introduced a new OneDrive for Business synchronization client in early 2016. Initially, the new client was able to synchronize with Microsoft-hosted SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business file libraries, and it did not support synchronization with on-premises SharePoint Server file libraries. An updated version of this client that can synchronize with on-premises SharePoint Server is now available for Windows PCs and iOS devices; it is not yet available for Android. Microsoft has indicated that it will introduce future improvements to on-premises OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Server capabilities through feature packs. Feature packs will require an organization to have active Software Assurance for SharePoint Server.