Sky Drive - History

History

On its launch, SkyDrive, known as Windows Live Folders at the time (with a codename of SkyDrive), was provided as a limited beta available to a few testers in the United States. On August 1, 2007, the service was expanded to a wider audience. Shortly after, on August 9, 2007 the service was renamed Windows Live SkyDrive and made available to testers in the United Kingdom and India. As of 22 May 2008 (2008-05-22) SkyDrive was available to 62 countries and regions. On December 2, 2008, the capacity of an individual SkyDrive account was upgraded from 5 GB to 25 GB, and Microsoft added a separate entry point called Windows Live Photos which allowed users to access their photos and videos stored on SkyDrive. This entry point allowed users to add "People tags" to their photos, download photos into Windows Photo Gallery or as a ZIP file, as well as viewing EXIF metadata such as camera information for the photos uploaded. Microsoft also added full-screen slide show support for photos using Silverlight.

SkyDrive was updated to "Wave 4" release on June 7, 2010, and added support for Office Web Apps, offering versioning support. In this update, due to the discontinuation of Windows Live Toolbar, the ability to synchronise and share bookmarked Web links between users via SkyDrive has also been discontinued. However, users are still able to use Windows Live Mesh to synchronise their favorites between computers, although the "cloud" storage component of the bookmarked Web links is no longer available. This feature replaces the previous Windows Live Favorites service.

In June 2010, users of Office Live Workspace, released in October 2007, were migrated to Windows Live Office. The migration included all existing workspaces, documents, and sharing permissions. The merger of the two services is a result of Microsoft's decision to merge its Office Live team into Windows Live back in January 2009, as well as several deficiencies with Office Live Workspace, which lacked high fidelity document viewing and did not allow files to be edited from within the web browser. Office Live Workspace also did not offer offline collaboration and co-authoring functionality – instead documents were "checked out" and "checked in," though the service did integrate with SharedView for real-time screen sharing.

On June 20, 2011, Microsoft overhauled the user interface for SkyDrive, built using HTML5 technologies. Microsoft also doubled the file size limit from 50 MB to 100 MB per file, as well as adding new features such as caching and hardware acceleration, support for HTML5 videos, Quick views, cleaner arrangement of photos, infinite scrolling. This update also brought together the different entry points for SkyDrive, such as Windows Live Photos and Windows Live Office, into one single interface. Files and folders shared with a user, including those in Windows Live Groups are also accessible in the new interface. On November 29, 2011, Microsoft updated SkyDrive to make sharing and file management easier, as well as HTML5 and other updates. This update also allowed users to see how much storage they had (and how much they had used), a feature that had been removed in the previous update as part of the redesign.

On December 3, 2011, Microsoft released a SkyDrive for iOS app, and a SkyDrive for Windows Phone app, which are available in the App Store and Windows Phone Marketplace respectively. On April 22, 2012, Microsoft released a SkyDrive desktop app for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and OS X users which allows them to synchronize files on SkyDrive, much like Windows Live Mesh, as well as allowing users to "fetch" files on their computer via the web browser. In addition, SkyDrive also provided additional storage available for purchase, and reduced the free storage space for new users to 7 GB (from 25 GB). Existing users were offered a free upgrade offer to retain their 25 GB of free storage. The updated SkyDrive also supports files up to 2 GB in size (uploaded via the SkyDrive desktop app). The update also brought additional features such as Open Document Format (ODF) support, URL shortening services, and direct sharing of files to Twitter.

On August 14, 2012, Microsoft announced a new update for SkyDrive which brought changes and improvements to SkyDrive.com, SkyDrive for Windows desktop and OS X, and the SkyDrive API as part of Live Connect. For SkyDrive.com, the updates brought a new "modern" design for the web service consistent with Outlook.com, and along with the UI update the service also received improvements such as instant search, contextual toolbar, multi-select in thumbnail view, drag-and-drop files into folders, and sorting improvements. For the SkyDrive for Windows desktop and OS X applications, the update brought new performance improvements to photo uploads and the sync experience. The update also improved the SkyDrive API with the removal of file type restrictions, ability to upload images in their full resolution, as well as a new SkyDrive file picker for opening and saving files. On August 28, 2012, Microsoft released a SkyDrive app for Android on Google Play store. On September 18, 2012, Microsoft also introduced a recycle bin feature on SkyDrive and announced that SkyDrive will support the creation of online surveys via Excel Web App.