OneDrive for Business Roadmap

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.

Technology Overview

OneDrive for Business is a set of technology and licensing plans for hosted file storage and sharing and a client-side synchronization engine that works on multiple platforms to access these stored files.

Components

The OneDrive for Business technology consists of client software, server software, and Microsoft-hosted services. Servers and hosted services both store files in document libraries, the Web-based file-sharing and document management component originally developed for SharePoint Server. OneDrive for Business focuses on Per-User document libraries, which are called OneDrive for Business libraries in SharePoint (and labeled OneDrive in the desktop user interface). The technology can also work with other kinds of SharePoint document libraries, such as the shared document libraries in SharePoint team sites and the Files document libraries in Office 365 Groups collaboration spaces.