SkyDrive Pro users get 25GB extra space among other improvements

If you own a business and use SkyDrive Pro to access files across multiple devices, Microsoft has some good news for you. The company will be providing accounts on the Pro service with more storage space and an improved way to share files.

In a blog post announcing the features, Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, Senior Product Managers on the SharePoint Marketing Team wrote that each user will now get 25GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space. Earlier, only 7GB worth of space was made available. Owners can now choose to increase users’ SkyDrive Pro storage beyond the default 25GB up to 50GB and 100GB.

Improvements come to SkyDrive Pro for businesses

The storage space limit can be adjusted for up to 25 users at once. The storage allotted will come out of the tenant’s overall pool of storage. This increase in storage space will not just benefit newer SkyDrive Pro users but also existing ones at no additional cost.

Office 365 now also has a feature called Shared with Me view through which users will be able to easily search for files shared with them. The files will all be visible in a single view within SkyDrive Pro for easier access. Once these files are shared with users, they have the same permissions that were originally given to them while the file was being shared. Users can view, edit, share and download the document like it was natively stored on their SkyDrive Pro.

In a bid to improve the service, SkyDrive Pro will now offer an overall increase in file upload limit as far as SharePoint online goes. The limit now stands at 2GB per file and the default recycle bin retention has been pushed up from 30 days to 90 days. The service is also enabling versioning by default on newly provisioned SkyDrive Pro libraries. This feature will save the last ten versions of your documents, essentially making sure you never lose a document.

These improvements to SkyDrive Pro have come even as Dropbox and Box both threaten to usurp Microsoft’s place as far as cloud storage for businesses is concerned. Box recently doubled its free storage option to 10GB and is offering 100GB of storage space per user for $5 a month.