It has been announced at the Ignite Conference at Atlanta.
A preview of the new OneDrive for Business client is now available.
The following are part of the improvements coming with the new version – some have been long waited:
- Ability to sync SharePoint Online document libraries – until then you were still obliged to use the ‘old’ O4B client while you were using the (so called) NextGen client to sync your personal OneDrive and your OneDrive for Business spaces (already included in the preview)
- Activity center to have an activity view at glance (already included in the preview)
In addition of these client side updates, additional major updates for the web browser as well as the mobile client
- 20 new file types supported for preview and rich thumbnails(rolling out by the end of this year)
- Download multiple files at once (zipped) – finally
(rolling out by the end of this year) - Notification for the mobile client (already available – see http://blog.hametbenoit.info/2016/09/26/office-365-be-notified-when-peoples-are-sharing-content-with-you-on-sharepoint-online-and-onedrive-for-business/)
and many more to come.
So, let’s go back to the client side.
You can get the preview version here https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=828410
You will need to download the new client (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=823059) and a registry key to activate the new capabilities (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=827743)
You need to stop synching your libraries with the current client
Close your current client instances and start installing the new client and regkey
Once the setup is completed, close again the instance automatically started and activate the registry key; the following key and value are added
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OneDrive]
"TeamSiteSyncPreview"=dword:00000001
Start your client again (use OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business)
To start synching a SharePoint library, you need to connect to the library using the web browser and then choose Sync (as you did with the current version); there is not yet (?) the ability to setup the sync directly from the client
Then within your Windows Explore you should see something like <your tenant name> where your SharePoint libraries will be sync – you may still view the ‘SharePoint’ as it comes with the current version of O4B
