Sharepoint 2013 : Creating team sites (part 2) - Using SkyDrive Pro

Using SkyDrive Pro

SkyDrive Pro is a SharePoint location to save and share the files that you work with every day. If you have used one of the consumer cloud-storage services such as SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint should feel comfortable and familiar. SkyDrive Pro, however, is a SharePoint-based service optimized for users within organizations to manage their business and work-related documents. Each SharePoint user has a SkyDrive Pro page and libraries to work with. It is available to you in the browser providing the normal SharePoint document library functionality. In addition, for the times when you are on the go, you have the option to synchronize your documents on to your client system with the SkyDrive Pro offline client. You can access and edit files across multiple devices, and have the files automatically synched up when you connect.

Note

If you use SharePoint 2013 in the cloud, each user is allocated a maximum of 7 GB of storage for personal documents. If you use SharePoint 2013 on-premise, the maximum amount of storage each user receives is up to your SharePoint administrators to determine.

Getting to your SkyDrive Pro is easy in SharePoint 2013; it has been added to the upper right of the main navigation bar. After you click the SkyDrive link, you are directed to your personal document library. Once in your library, creating new documents in SkyDrive Pro is also easy to do. Create a Word document, Microsoft Excel workbook, Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow, or Microsoft OneNote notebook directly from your browser by clicking the + New Document button, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. You can create new items in SkyDrive Pro with the New Document link.

Note

If you plan to use Office Web Apps to create new items, as shown in Figure 4, your SharePoint farm administrators will need to install and configure an Office Web Apps farm.

Alternatively, you can create the document in the Office 2013 client applications on your device and save them directly to SkyDrive Pro, as shown in Figure 5. Notice that Garth has the option to save to either his SkyDrive Pro (denoted by the “S” icon), or to his consumer version of SkyDrive if he is creating items that are not for work usage.

Figure 5. In Office 2013, users have the option of saving directly to SkyDrive Pro.

To synchronize your files to a local computer, the SkyDrive Pro Sync button is now ubiquitous in SharePoint libraries in the upper-right portion of the page. Clicking Sync will make a copy of the files from your personal library (or any team document library). You can take these files offline with you and make changes to them; when you reconnect, the changes are synchronized back to the appropriate library. Likewise, if there are new files in the document library, when you connect, those will be synched down to your local computer’s SkyDrive Pro folder, as shown in Figure 6. Your SkyDrive Pro folder is created automatically for you within your user profile directory.

Figure 6. The SkyDrive Pro client application is displayed within a user’s profile directory.

What happened to SharePoint Workspace?

With the introduction of SkyDrive Pro, SharePoint Workspace is no longer being developed for the 2013 platform. SkyDrive Pro replaces the feature that SharePoint Workspace 2010 was most commonly used for: offline document synchronization. However, if you need to continue supporting it, the 2010 version of SharePoint Workspace still works just fine with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, and SharePoint Online.

In addition to your own documents, SkyDrive Pro lets you manage documents you care about across SharePoint by displaying a list of your followed documents. You can see in Figure 7 that SkyDrive Pro keeps track of documents that you have followed from other sites.

Figure 7. SkyDrive Pro keeps track of a user’s followed documents.