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The official blog of the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group
2012
July 23
Introducing SkyDrive Pro
by   sharepointblog@live.com   on  7/23/2012 4:30 PM

​It's 7am on Thursday. Today's a big day. You're presenting an important marketing proposal to management for your company's new ice cream flavor, the Arc de Triple Chocolate Chunk. Where others might have under-delivered and fallen apart, you’ve worked tirelessly to create a presentation that demonstrates how to guarantee success for your frozen masterpiece, how you’ll target the $10 billion take-home ice cream market, and how your team will launch this exciting new flavor before the end of July, National Ice Cream Month. You've pulled together a lot of information from a lot of different people, and it looks great.  In an age of doing, you are the go-to person, the James Bond of ice cream marketing, and you've mastered it using SkyDrive Pro.

If you’re familiar with the personal cloud storage service you get with SkyDrive, you’ll be right at home with SkyDrive Pro, a service optimized for business and managed by your company or organization. It’s your hub for work documents: the one place to find, store, and share the files you care about for work. And today, SkyDrive Pro is going to launch you to productivity superstardom. Let’s rewind a bit and see how you got here.
 

Monday, 10am: Get started with your documents

R&D has come out with a new flavor, and your head honcho wants a marketing proposal for it by the end of week. You need to gather a lot of information and fast: a report on the global change in ice cream preference among small children, a chart showing flavor sales by month, and ice cream label design comparisons. Creating new documents in SkyDrive Pro is simple: start a Word Document, Excel Workbook, PowerPoint Slideshow, or OneNote Notebook directly from your browser, or create a document in any of the Office applications and save it directly to SkyDrive Pro.

 
You can also keep your label designs, market analysis PDFs, and quarterly sales reports in SkyDrive Pro by saving there directly or dragging the files into SkyDrive Pro in a web browser.
 

Monday, 1pm: Work on your documents

Once your documents are in SkyDrive Pro, it’s easy to see details and work with them. Right click the row or click the document callout button to quickly see more information about a document and take actions like opening, editing, and changing properties. With Office Web Apps, you can view an interactive preview of your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. You’ll also see who the file is shared with and be able to share it with others.
 

Tuesday, 9am: Share your documents with others

Up until now, the documents you’ve started have been private, but now it’s time for the team to put pen to paper. Share specific documents with people: Armando from the marketing team can add his piece on the importance of marketing ice cream regionally, and Sara from brand management can include her bit on why creamy, “premium” ice cream is more popular than individually-wrapped novelties. With co-authoring (available in Office 2010 and later and in the Office Web Apps), everyone can work on the same document without having to deal with outdated copies or combining multiple files. 
 
 

Tuesday, 1:30: Data loss crisis, averted

You open up the Ice Cream Labeling and Quality Report to find out that critical data about customer satisfaction for ice cream fat content is missing! It looks Andy, the new intern, accidentally deleted a slide. Fortunately, SkyDrive Pro always automatically saves the last version of the document that you edited, so you can always return to your previous copy. Your data is recovered, and Andy has a learning moment that doesn’t cause an ice cream meltdown.

Wednesday, 11am: Find what’s important

In addition to your own documents, SkyDrive Pro lets you find documents you care about across SharePoint by showing a list of your followed documents. Follow Sameer’s report on the latest market trends or Kim’s branding proposal presentation, and you can find them on the Followed Documents page in SkyDrive Pro. SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint revolve around you so it’s easy to find your way around.  
 
In Office 365, you’ll also find a list of recent documents, so you can quickly find that marketing analysis report that started writing with Armando yesterday.  You’ll find this list everywhere you log into Office 365, including SkyDrive Pro in the browser, and the Office Apps on your desktop or mobile device.  
 

Today, 7:30am: Access your documents anywhere

As a productivity all-star, you don't waste time commuting to the office: you take your office with you.  You can sync SkyDrive Pro to your local computer, so you can work on that important presentation even when you don't have access to the internet.


Sync your files with one push of a button, and you're ready to use your minutes on the metro to get things done. You'll have a polished presentation ready for management before they have time to grab their morning coffee. 
 

Tonight, 7pm: Mobile access so you can get done & get back to dinner

You're at dinner celebrating a job well done when your manager emails you that the presentation was a hit! So much so that they want to show the CMO tomorrow, and they need that presentation… now.  Whip out your phone and share the document faster than the waiter can bring you a basket of bread and butter. It’ll make your boss look good, and you can get back to your dinner date. Your files are with you, no matter where you are.

Tomorrow: Sharing with your organization

Management loved your finalized marketing report, so you can share your masterpiece with everyone in your organization; drag the presentation into the “Shared with Everyone” folder. Every file placed here will automatically be visible and editable by everyone in your organization; no need to individually share them with each person. You can also post the document in the newsfeed, or send the link out by email.
 
Say good-bye to email attachment overload and worrying about outdated documents. Gone are the days of frantically trying to track down that document you were working on and making last-minute slide corrections. Today, you’ve got a great looking presentation that proves you’re a chocolate ice cream marketing genius and a document collaboration master. Your boss is so impressed, he’ll be asking you for tips on how you pulled it all together.

Welcome to the world of frictionless document collaboration at work.
Welcome to SkyDrive Pro.

 

Permanent Link to Post | Email Post Link | Number of Comments 11 Comment(s)

Comments

Re: Introducing SkyDrive Pro

I love SkyDrive! A really nifty app! I use it all the time - for personal reasons.
I also use SharePoint - even more - as I am a SharePoint architect. What I don't understand, from a professional point of view, why I would use SkyDrive pro in my enterprise when I already have SharePoint en Workspace. I don't see any enhancement at all. True the sharing part in SkyDrive is easier to manage then in SharePoint but besides that? This cool app is a life saver if you don't use SharePoint that's for sure.
 on 7/25/2012 5:43 PM

Context Menu

I don't have SKydrive Pro, so I don't want a greyed out option taking up space in my context menu when I right click any file.
 on 7/28/2012 5:56 PM

Where's the executive summary?

TL;DR is there an article that explains Sky Drive Pro does that is not written as a creative writing exercise? Do I have to pay for it? How do I buy it?

Why is there a Nagware menu?

Sky Drive Pro is suffering from New Kid On The Block Syndrome, Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
 on 7/31/2012 3:18 PM

RE: Where's the executive summary?

SkyDrive Pro is an integral part of SharePoint 2013. There's no separate software/app that is being discussed here. There is no separate cost.

Have you tried installing SharePoint 2013? If you do, you will see a SkyDrive link in the top nav - That's SkyDrive Pro on the server. Click on Sync button, and it will launch a client component which syncs down all documents in SkyDrive Pro for Offline access.

I have no idea what you mean by nagware menu.
 on 8/7/2012 4:07 PM

Click on Sync button...

After clicking Sync, will it then: a) continually sync files, b) from multiple Sharepoint libraries to my PC, c) bi-directionally without any further user intervention?
 on 8/10/2012 1:38 AM

SkyDrive Pro vs. SharePoint

how we should position SkyDrive Pro vs. SharePoint document libraries for corporate users - when to use what?
 on 8/10/2012 7:37 PM

Sync = Dangerous?

If you can just sync for offline, how different is this than the old "Briefcase?" app? More importantly how do you maintain control I confidential or protected information, in the health care arena for instance. How could you ever hope to be compliant with regulatory requirements by enabling unfettered access to information from personal and unmanaged or protected devices?
 on 8/16/2012 8:38 AM

Consumer UX/ Enterprise grade security & management

I think the compelling point of SkyDrive pro is the delivery of document sharing that rivals the slick drag and drop/ collaborative consumer appeal of google docs, dropbox, SkyDrive, etc. while actually being an enterprise-managed resource.  With regard to the comment about regulatory complicance... I believe that illustrates the point.  You can continue to host/ manage your SP server on prem or in a secure data center, but deliver a very appealing end-user experience.  It's about embracing consumerization responsibly.
 on 8/25/2012 5:12 AM

SkyDrive Pro and the lookup columns threshold

If you add two more lookup (or managed metadata) columns to a library, you are not able to sync with SkyDrive Pro anymore, because of the threshold.
Will you fix this? Why does SkyDrive Pro look at those aditional columns in the first place? It can't use those anyways. This is a stupid leftover from SharePoint Workspace / Groove. Will this be fixed soon?
 on 12/13/2012 6:06 PM

Confusing

It isn't SkyDrive? or is it?
 on 1/24/2013 9:31 PM
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