Articles about SkyDrive

In June of 2012 Apple officially shut down MobileMe, migrating customers to iCloud. With storage space now being downgraded, the market apparently seems right to Microsoft to take advantage of cloud customers by offering its own alternative, in the form of SkyDrive -- or the service soon to be formerly known as SkyDrive.

The only official announcement came from the service's official Twitter account, simply asking a question and offering a solution -- "did Apple cancel your extra MobileMe storage? Fwd the downgrade email to [email protected] for an extra 15GB of SkyDrive for 1 year".

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Microsoft introduced its SkyDrive cloud storage service to the world back in 2007, almost six years ago to the day, in fact. The service may have started slow, but with Windows 8 and Office 2013 the momentum has increased, with better integration. Now the software maker rolls out even more options to the storage site.

The company wishes to support the new HD and Retina displays contained within today's devices, and has added such support directly into its latest iteration of the cloud service. Microsoft's Omar Shahine announces that SkyDrive supports these high DPI displays by "measuring the DPI scale of your device. When your screen supports it, we show higher resolution photos and thumbnails. So you see more of your real photo instead of a thumbnail that gets up-scaled (note: not all browsers support high DPI yet)". This illustrates the service's ability to process such photos as those captured in RAW format.

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Welcome to the cloud. Microsoft hopes it is not a dark and ominous one. The company is in competition with Amazon, Dropbox and others to get your business in today's growing storage market and is trying to get the upper hand by tightly integrating its SkyDrive service into the latest builds of Windows and Office.

Now the company announces further integration with new Pro apps for both Windows 8 and iOS. "We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro apps for Windows 8 and iOS are now available in the Windows Store and Apple Store respectively for SharePoint Online users in Office 365. After signing in to your Office 365 account, you can access, view, and upload your documents from anywhere", says senior product manager Mark Kashman.

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During day two's keynote at the Microsoft Build 2013 developer conference, Server and Tools Business President Satya Nadella talked about the SaaS (Software as a Service) applications Microsoft runs.

In particular he focused on the scale and diversity of the company’s daily work in the cloud, while a "Battle Tested" slide displayed the all-important numbers for Xbox Live, Skype, Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive and Bing.

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If you're an avid SkyDrive or Office 365 user who happens to leverage Office Web Apps, Microsoft let loose information on a round of updates that will be hitting the browser based suite quite "soon" according to an official Office 365 blog video.

The posting was part of Microsoft's informal "Garage Series" set of video-blogs aimed at IT professionals who support Office. I happened to stumble upon this week-old entry and was quite surprised at what Microsoft has in store -- namely, hitting Google Docs where Office Web Apps haven't been able to thus far: rich real time co-authoring and collaboration.

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Cloud storage solution SkyDrive is getting additional functionality. Microsoft is banking on the service becoming the primary storage method for those who are part of the company's ecosystem. The software giant has made SkyDrive a focus in both Windows 8 and Office 2013 / 365 Home Premium.

Microsoft's Omar Shahine announces that "starting today and rolling out over the next 48 hours, we're making it easier for you to see all of your photos in SkyDrive across all your albums and folders based on a timeline view". With timeline view you will be able to scroll down to navigate through all of the images. They are organized into groups by event and time.

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Late yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 8 users from all over the world can now finally take advantage of the complete photo and video backup feature offered by its smartphone operating system. This comes a tad over six months after the Windows Phone 8 release in late-October, last year. A little too late, wouldn't you agree?

Previously, users from a number of regions were constricted to use a dumbed-down backup feature that only allowed automatically upload of low-resolution pictures (no video support) straight to SkyDrive. "We just started to light this up, so be patient if you don’t see it right away. The change could take a few days to roll out around the globe", Aaron Sauvé, Microsoft senior program manager says.

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SkyDrive has been around since 2007, so perhaps there is no surprise that the cloud storage service has a large number of users. Combine its venerability with the fact the service is now rolled into Windows 8 and Office 2013, and you have a recipe for success. That is exactly what Microsoft reports today.

Microsoft's Mike Torres, group program manager for SkyDrive apps, says "the service continues to grow: since October 2012 when Windows 8 launched, 50 million more people have started using SkyDrive, helping us reach an important milestone -- over 250 million people are now using SkyDrive as the new place to save their files".

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One way to gain loads of free online storage space is to mix and match storage providers, taking advantage of each to quickly build up tens of gigabytes of cloud-based storage for backup, sync and sharing purposes. The downside of such an approach is the fact you need to manage each provider using its own dedicated app.

Nowhere is this frustration more evident than when using a tablet or phone to access your data, as you have to switch between apps to try and locate where you’ve stored a particular file. But help may be hand in the form of an app for Windows 8, iPad and Android calledRainbowDrive 2.0.0 that attempts to bring multiple providers together under one roof.

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Over weekend Microsoft's next version of Windows, known by code name "Blue" leaked out to the world via BiTorrent. Over the past two days we dissected the operating system in every way possible from first look to screenshot images to ways to install the still buggy operating system.

Now that the initial euphoria has passed, we can settle down and get a good look at what exactly will change in the operating system later this year when Windows Blue is rumored to be released.

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Cloud storage providers Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive have both released minor maintenance updates for their desktop applications. Both Dropbox 2.0.2 and the Windows version of Microsoft SkyDrive 2013 v17.0.2006.0314 are minor maintenance releases with no new features.

Both updates are the first since major releases -- Dropbox 2.0introduced a new sharing-friendly user interface, while SkyDrive 17.0 allowed users to selectively sync folders and sub-folders to specific devices.

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There are plenty of benefits of living in the cloud, but some major downsides too. Nearly five months ago an Amazon Cloud outage took down BetaNews' group chat service, alongside Heroku, Flipboard, Foursquare and Reddit among others. And, two days ago, Microsoft users went through a similar ordeal which mostly affected Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive -- three of Microsoft's more essential cloud services.

Microsoft's vice president, Arthur de Haan, has chimed in on the matter in a blog post which links the outage to the upgrade process from Hotmail to the new out-of-beta email service Outlook.com. Since 13:35 PM PDT on March 12 until 5:43 AM PDT on March 13, de Haan says that "a small part of the SkyDrive service, but primarily Hotmail.com and Outlook.com" suffered from a service interruption caused by a firmware update which failed "in an unexpected way".

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Microsoft announced the new Office 2013 / Office 365 release on January 29th and the new suite, no matter which version of it you choose, comes with tight integration with the company's cloud storage service, SkyDrive. You do not have to use it -- you can still store your files locally, but it makes for easier work when a document can easily be accessed from everywhere and shared with co-workers.

However, apparently a lot of people are taking advantage of the feature, because today Microsoft's Sarah Filman, lead program manager for SkyDrive, announces that the service now stores a lot of files -- "Recently we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive".

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Perhaps it is just me, but Microsoft's decision to take Live Mesh off of life-support has hit especially hard. We knew this was coming of course, but still, I like having my files synced between multiple computers and, while I love SkyDrive, I do not need the cloud as an intermediary within my own home -- that is ridiculous overkill and would cost me money as well.

Today the company dispatched email reminders that began "Dear Mesh customer, Recently we released the latest version of SkyDrive, which you can use to..." Yes, thanks a lot. I know what I can use it for, but syncing between computers in my home is not something I should be compelled to use it for.

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Late this afternoon, Microsoft answered a question oft-asked by investors this month: What's up with Windows 8? The new operating system, which launched October 26, was supposed to lift sagging PC sales and demonstrate the capability to successfully compete with so-called post-PC platforms like Android and iOS. Now we know more. Windows & Windows Live revenue passed Business, making the OS division most-valuable again.

For fiscal second quarter, ended December 31, Microsoft revenue was $21.46 billion, up 3 percent year over year. Operating income: $7.77 billion, a 3 percent decrease. Net income was $6.38 billion, or 76 cents a share.

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