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Improvements to Microsoft's Skydrive

Easier Document Sharing and Editing

By Rand Morimoto on Sat, 02/09/13 - 5:21pm.

This past week Microsoft added a function that allows SkyDrive users to share documents for EDITING that does NOT require the recipient to have to login with a LiveID. Effectively, as long as you "share" the content for editing, the recipient of the URL can make changes and save changes to documents.

This is a HUGE improvement from the past where, if you wanted to share a document for collaboration and editing, the recipient had to have a LiveID account. For those of us with LiveID accounts, that hasn't been an issue, but if you've ever wanted to share a doc for edits and the group of individuals you want to edit the document with don't have LiveIDs, they have to "create" a LiveID account, login, and then edit the document.

Many a time I've wanted to share a document with others to review, comment, edit, but didn't know if they had a LiveID account and as such, just chose to do editing the old-fashioned way by attaching the file to an email, sending it to the recipient, have them edit the doc, and then return it to me via email. Not very efficient.

To see how this works, the process is:

1) User creates a document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), logs on to SkyDrive, uploads the file to SkyDrive
2) User clicks on the document and selects Share and chooses to share the document and allow the recipient to Edit the document
3) When the Share/Edit is selected, a LINK is created to the document that you can simply cut/paste into an email and forward on to a recipient
4) Now with that special LINK, the recipient can client on the link to access the file (without having to type in a LiveID logon name/password)
5) The recipient can then choose to "Edit in Browser" and begin to edit the document, and then click on File/Save to save the edited document

As you'll see in the graphic below, as a recipient, I am editing a document and you'll notice in the upper righthand corner, I am NOT logged in, so an anonymous editing of a shared document. VERY simple and easy to do!

The next thing I'm working Microsoft on is the ability to have anonymous uploads to a folder I create and share. So many times I've wanted someone to send me a document that is too large to send by email (ie: picture, video, presentation) and they don't have a way to save the file to a shared location. We usually end up using some bigfile/web upload "thing" that they find on the Web for free, but if I could only open up a folder on MY SkyDrive and have them upload the file, that would hit a homerun for me in the day-to-day document sharing, collaboration, Web-based storage needs. Stay tuned...

Rand Morimoto is the President of Convergent Computing (http://www.cco.com) an early adopter partner of Microsoft that put Windows Server 2012 in production environments over 18-months before the product release. Rand is also the author of the book “Windows Server 2012 Unleashed,” over 1565-pages of tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned on Windows 2012, by Sams Publishing. Rand also co-authored the books “Exchange 2013 Unleashed” and “System Center 2012 Unleashed,” books also based on early adopter hands-on and real world implementations.