Microsoft's SkyDrive now hosts over one billion Office documents

Shawn Knight

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Staff member

Earlier today Microsoft revealed that its cloud-based SkyDrive service now plays host to more than 1 billion documents. There’s little doubt that the service saw a massive increase in use thanks to its tie-in with the recently released Office 365.

Microsoft also used the occasion to announce a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps. Up to this point, anyone that wanted to edit a document would first have to sign into a Microsoft account. As you can imagine or may have firsthand experience with, this can be rather frustrating if you need to simply make a quick edit.

Sarah Filman, Microsoft’s lead program manager for SkyDrive, points outs out that this has been one piece of feedback that they have consistently heard about, especially from students. That’s no longer a concern as anyone can click a link and begin the editing process without signing in. Of course, the person sharing the document can still require a login in the event that privacy or security is a concern.

As PC Mag points out, surpassing 1 billion documents is a significant milestone but until we know how many documents are hosted on major competing services like Google Drive or Dropbox, there’s really no real way to gauge the impact of Microsoft’s achievement.

Have you tried Office 365 with SkyDrive integration yet, and if so, what are your thoughts on the service as a whole thus far?

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Can't say I'd trust any of the "cloud" services with any important documents. It's only a matter of time until a security breach happens, based on previous experiences.
 
Good for them. How many of those documents were spawned by MS employees and those forced to use it through corporate policy enforcement?

Boiling in IT, I know nobody who would even consider using it. 'Nough said.
 
Good for them. How many of those documents were spawned by MS employees and those forced to use it through corporate policy enforcement?

Boiling in IT, I know nobody who would even consider using it. 'Nough said.

SkyDrive is not used by IT as it is a consumer-grade. Corporations use SharePoint.

Nice try though.
 
With this update last reason to have dropbox account is no more (at least for me), so I'll move most of my stuff to SkyDrive and being an old user I have 25GB limit :).
 
Can't say I'd trust any of the "cloud" services with any important documents. It's only a matter of time until a security breach happens, based on previous experiences.

That's why you should always encrypt your files before uploading them to any cloud storage service, using your own keys that are kept secret from the cloud. Even if an outsider does access your stored files, encryption renders files effectively unreadable to hackers.
 
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