Sunday, November 9, 2014

New OWA and OneDrive for Business Integration

Sometimes it is the little things that count. There has been a new feature added to OWA and OneDrive for Business. If you have not tried, trying closing down Outlook for a day and play with OWA, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for a day. You will see all this new integration where everything seems to be one click away.

Case in point, Microsoft just added a new feature to OWA that allows you very easily send a OneDrive for Business file.

First attaching a file has changed. In the old days you used to attach a file to a message, send it to someone, they edit the file locally and then reattach the file to an email and send it back to you. Inefficient in numerous ways. Now there is a new feature in OWA that allows you to select a file from OneDrive for business and then a link to the file is sent to users. This is more efficient because we are not attaching and sending around numerous versions a file. There is a single version of that file, and it is located in your OneDrive for Business. What is even more impressive is that the permissions to the OneDrive for Business file is automatically set to view/edit for all the people in the To and CC line of your email. This is awesome because you can quickly send a file to anyone via a link. They and perform edits without having to download the file and then just give you a simple notification they are done with their edits.

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Second, there is also a new option in OWA that allows you to quickly attach a local file to an email, but instead of attaching the file to message, you can again select to share the file through OneDrive for Business. What will happen this time is OWA will take the local file, upload it to OneDrive for Business for you and then insert a link to in an email. This again saves me tons of clicks.

One really good point made about this is once a file gets into OneDrive for Business, everyone on the email can co-author the file. No more ten people creating different edits and then you having to try to merge everything back together.

Like I said it is the simple things that count.

Reference - http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/08/introducing-new-way-share-files-outlook-web-app/

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