Can Microsoft address customer issues with unlimited storage to Office 365 users

Software vendor Microsoft today said OneDrive will offer unlimited cloud storage to all Office 365 subscribers without any additional cost.

The additional package is coming at a time when several people are complaining about lack of storage capacity.

Microsoft says the roll out will start today, first targeting Microsoft Office 365 Home, Personal and University plan subscribers. Microsoft will update more details around the roll out for OneDrive for Business customers through the standard Office 365 roadmap website.

Microsoft has more than 7 million Office 365 Home and Personal Subscribers.

“For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes,” said Chris Jones, corporate vice president, OneDrive & SharePoint.

“Unlimited storage is one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations,” Jone said in a blog post.

Microsoft Office 365

In the same Microsoft blog post, Jay Gallman, one of the Office 365 subscribers, said: “When can we dismiss the marketing hype, and start addressing the actual issues that OneDrive for Business faces well before the 1 TB limit?

Without selective sync, and coupled with the cache for the process, laptop users with 128 SSDs won’t begin to be able to scratch the surface of that available space. “I’ll get pumped about a blog post when I see some of those concerns addressed, until then it’s just hype and hot air for me,” said Gallman.

Another comment said: “While this is welcome news, there are other limitations that need to be addressed first. Namely, the 20,000 item sync limitation in OneDrive for Business as well as the 10 GB file size limit. At the already impressive 1 TB storage limit, 20,000 files would have an average size of 52 MB – clearly not what you would expect for Word docs or a PDFs.”

Baburajan K
[email protected]

1 COMMENT

  1. Actually, there are workarounds for the mentioned OneDrive for business issues.

    As for selective sync:
    An easy solution is to create multiple document stores. Sync only the default store to your device and use other stores to store stuff you only want online

    As for 20k limit: this is an issues with the onedrive client. You can store up to 30 million documents in one document store using regular drag/drop copy/paste via windows explorer. It is actually a limit per store, so by using multiple document stores (for Office 365 / Sharepoint online users) you can sync a multiple of 20k. Use the my-sharepoint portal to add additional stores.

    Howto: Open the office portal, go to your personal page, go to Site Contents, Add an App, add a new document library. Done!. Don’t forget to check the permissons, It tends to inherit readonly rights for your colleagues, you problably don’t want that……

    As for the 10G limit….. Well…. I gues only 2 reasons for files over 10G: Backups and Blurays… The first ones can be split using 7zip, winrar, filesplit etc…. the second ones….. consider Netflix.