Wednesday, January 6, 2016

New Year...OneDrive new UI and a bug in it

Update 01/02/2016: It seems that through the new UI you can now even upload folders (one by one for now) with drag & drop! Great functionality that has been missing so far...

Hey, it's been a while since my last post...holiday season got us all, right? :) Happy New Year, everyone! Let it bring you a lot of new tech, gadjets, innovations and of course health and happiness!

It's been more than a month since we all could use the OneDrive new UI and I've decided to share my first positive impressions of the it and a very unpleasant bug unfortunately, so you can take an informed decision whether to use it or switch back to the classic experience.

First, it looks really nice, based on HTML5 and it's even responsive! Good job so far for the OneDrive team. There must be something with Jeff Teper going back to leading the SharePoint and OneDrive divisions @ MS :)

The menus are arranged in a better way, even though the Version History is still kind of hidden in the context menu.












You can now drag & drop stuff in the browser... e.g. move a file or folder into another one - how cool is that? Let's hope we'll see that in SharePoint some day... which is still using some old-school XHTML 1.0.




There's also a file size column now added, which I don't use that much, considering the 1 TB storage limit, but anyway... another small improvement.

Now tot he bad news...

Whenever you try to share a folder (and it happens with files sometimes) and share it with more than 1 person they DON'T all get the notifications over email. E.g. you share it with Peter, Joe and Dean, then you check your mail (as you're in cc of those notifications by default) and realize that only Peter got the email with the link to the file.

Unpleasant.

After I've talked with one of my friends at Microsoft, I got a confirmation that this issue is only present in the new UI and is being worked upon, however it's now taking a few weeks and there's no resolution.

It all works just fine if you do share the file/folder with one person. And of course you can always forward the notification to the appropriate people once you see it in your inbox, but this is what OneDrive's for - avoid shooting a bunch of emails about the same file.

I'm hoping to see this resolved soon, otherwise we'll just have to use the classic experience...which is not that sophisticated to be honest, but at least one of its basic functionalities (the notification) works.

I might write another post about the NGCS (Next Generation Sync Client) that I was testing as part of the preview for more than a month now... still some mixed feelings about it, if you plan to use both the new UI and the new client organization-wide, maybe you should hold on...

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