Improved sharing & new HTML5 features for SkyDrive.com

We’re ringing in the new year with a few improvements to SkyDrive.com. You now have a single, unified view into how each of your files is shared so you can more easily control who has access to your files. We’ve also added more HTML5 features for touch devices making the SkyDrive experience faster and more fluid across devices and we’ve introduced more drag-and-drop capabilities to make it easier to manage your files, photos and documents.

Integrated view of sharing permissions

SkyDrive offers a number of different ways to share your files—email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or simply generating a link to send to whoever you want. As more and more SkyDrive files are being shared, people are often using more than one of these at a time. To make this easier, we’ve unified all sharing-related info and tasks into a single screen. So now when you select a document and click Share in the command bar, you’ll see all the different ways to share the item as well as who has access.

For instance, in the above picture, you can see that my Top Restaurants document is shared to 2 people and I’ve created a view link.

And when I select one of those (for example Chris Jones in the image below), I can then change the kind of access to my document (view only or edit) and also remove permissions.

And of course, you can also share the file with more people by selecting one of the share options.

Improved selection for touch-based devices

If you’re using touch to interact with SkyDrive.com, you can now select an item or multiple items by swiping on the item to the left or right—similar to interactions on a new Windows 8 PC.

In the screen shot below, I’ve simply tapped the item to select it.

Repeating the touch gesture will un-select it.

Improved drag-and-drop support

In addition to being able to drag and drop files into your SkyDrive, you can now move files to anywhere in the hierarchy of your SkyDrive by using the bread crumb bar as the target. As you can see below, I’m moving a PDF in my Scans folder one level up to the Documents folder.

Finally, we’re also releasing a number of improvements under the hood which won’t be visible to you, but are designed to make SkyDrive.com even faster and more reliable. All of these features are releasing today and should be available in your SkyDrive soon.

Omar Shahine
Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com