Microsoft is renaming SkyDrive as OneDrive. The company's cloud file-storage service, which launched in 2007, will soon be rechristened with the new name, and all SkyDrive products will eventually migrate to OneDrive.com.
The name change reflects Microsoft's intention to recast its cloud service as the "one place for all your documents." Microsoft has been increasingly steering its customers toward using SkyDrive, giving away 200GB of free storage for two years to anyone who buys a Surface tablet as well as making SkyDrive the default place to store documents in apps like Word and Excel in Windows 8.1.
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"We believe the new OneDrive name conveys the value we can deliver for you and best represents our vision for the future," Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's general manager of consumer apps and services, said in a blog post. "Expect to be able to experience the new OneDrive soon."
"Soon" is the only timeline that Microsoft gave for the migration to OneDrive, and so far, all SkyDrive products retain their names and domains. SkyDrive.com is still active, and OneDrive.com shows a preview site, with just an email sign-up for people who want to know when the site will be open for business.
Functionally, OneDrive will work the same as SkyDrive, Gavin wrote, and users of SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro shouldn't notice any changes apart from the name. SkyDrive Pro, a the business-focused arm of the service, also gets a new name: OneDrive for Business, mirroring the naming convention established by other cloud services, such as Dropbox.
In Windows 8.1, Microsoft added new features to SkyDrive to ease users' transition from saving locally to storing documents in the cloud. SkyDrive keeps placeholder files on the local drive that take up a minuscule amount of space but enable the PC to treat the files as local files — complete with thumbnail previews — up to the point when opened. Working in Office documents saved in the cloud, which introduced noticeable lags in Windows 8, was also improved.
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