Microsoft delivered on a long awaited feature of OneDrive last week - the syncing of shared folders.
Microsoft announced the feature back in February 2014 and called it Co-Owners. As far as I can tell, it’s no longer called co-owners, though the concept is still the same.
The new feature allows users of the consumer version of OneDrive to add folders that have been shared with them to their own OneDrive. Once added, these folders can be synced to computers and devices. Any changes are uploaded to OneDrive and appear for all users who access the folder.
Since the shared folder appears to be inside your own OneDrive, the feature works on all versions of the app - PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
It came in handy last week for one of my clients who run Macs and don’t have a business version of Office 365 since their parent organisation runs hosted exchange through another provider. The feature was very easy to set up and involves just a few steps.
To add shared folders to your OneDrive
- Log in to www.onedrive.com as the user that has folders shared with them
- Click the Shared link on the left menu
- Select the folder by right-clicking or ticking the circle in the top right of the folder. Choose Add to My OneDrive. It’s either on the context menu if you right-click, or on the top menu if you select the folder.
- Once added to OneDrive, you can access this folder from any device, or sync it to your PC or Mac.
