Starting today, professionals can enjoy a completely renewed OneDrive web experience with many exciting new features and improvements.

According to Microsoft, OneDrive for Business welcomes more than 2 billion new files per day. To make life easier for all users, numerous innovations are being implemented that are already available today. At the same time, the software giant is also showing many new features that are expected soon.

The most important thing to know is that all innovations are implemented within the web interface. The OneDrive desktop app remains unchanged.

The web interface gets a completely new design with a clear segment at the top with the AI-selected “For You” files. Other new features include segments around meetings where you can find files from meetings, as well as a clear location with all shared documents.

You can now also easily filter by people within the organization. Ideal if you don’t remember the file name but know who you shared it with.

New features later this year

All of the above features are available now. Microsoft has many ambitious plans for OneDrive in the near future.

In our opinion, the most important future update is the ability to automatically open files via the web interface with a desktop application, for example a PDF or CAD file. Today this is already possible with Word, PowerPoint or Excel, but Microsoft is now expanding this function to all applications.

The updated interface will soon be available in Teams and Outlook. This makes it easier to navigate through files in both applications without having to look up the web interface separately.

Soon offline file access will also be compatible with the web interface. Starting in early 2024, you’ll be able to launch OneDrive in your browser and view, sort, rename, move, copy, and delete files without internet access.

Finally, from now on you can create new files directly and start with a blank page or with the numerous templates available. This feature and the new media display with significantly more interactivity will be available from summer 2024.

Microsoft Copilot AI

Starting in December, organizations with a Microsoft Copilot license can also use the AI ​​tool in OneDrive. The chatbot can help you answer questions about a file or provide a summary of a document. Copilot looks beyond the boundaries of OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams to collect data within the organization.

Microsoft is also looking further into the future through the further integration of Copilot AI and gives an example of this. Imagine you’ve just started a new project called Munson and need to get up to speed. You ask Copilot, “View all files that have been shared with me in the last week regarding Project Munson.” Once Copilot has helped you find the relevant files, it will understand that it could be beneficial to you to add them to a new folder.

Copilot then adds these files to the new folder and recommends other Project Munson-related files that were not part of your original search. This way you can add them to your newly created folder. What started as a simple natural language search has now resulted in your personal Project Munson knowledge library, according to Microsoft.

It is not yet known when this advanced Copilot AI feature will be available in OneDrive.