Microsoft would like to make OneDrive “the center of your files experience in Microsoft 365.” Sixteen years after the cloud-based storage platform was launched, it “hosts trillions of files, with nearly 2 billion more files added every day,” the company says. The result is OneDrive source files sprawling across the entire Windows ecosystem — extending to SharePoint libraries, traveling as attachments and exchanged through Teams chats. Now Microsoft is adding AI Copilot integration and AI and, overall, making it easier to find things in what it calls the next generation of OneDrive.

This third iteration centralizes data hubs, making the material more navigable. The goal is to put the files at your fingertips, “no matter where they live.”

The latest OneDrive includes “new file views, governance controls, creation tools, and Copilot to help you quickly search, organize and extract information from your files,” Microsoft explains, adding that the new protocols aren’t limited to OneDrive; they’re “coming to Teams and Outlook for a consistent and rich file experience across Microsoft 365.”

“The latest version of OneDrive is smarter, faster, and designed to be your main file manager,” writes The Verge, describing “quality-of-life improvements that will make managing and using files a lot better on the web, in Windows, and in Microsoft’s various Office apps.” An AI-driven series of file recommendations now appear on the “For you” section similar to File Explorer.

“Basically, OneDrive is adding a number of views, so files can be organized by who shared them, if they’re relevant to upcoming meetings, and so on,” writes PCWorld, noting that the changes are available for business users starting now.

Microsoft also outlined better integration for OneDrive with Teams, Word, Outlook and more, says PCWorld, explaining that beginning in December “you’ll start to see OneDrive appear in the left navigation bar of Teams and Outlook, for example, so you can jump right to the relative files.

In Q1 Microsoft will add offline access to the browser-based version of OneDrive. Files on Demand will appear as placeholders for users of OneDrive on the web, PCWorld says, adding that Microsoft is pairing this “with an offline mode, so you’ll be able to open a local copy of the file on your PC, edit and make changes to it, and those changes will be quietly synced once you return online.”

By summer, expect Microsoft to make it possible to create things like new Word documents “by launching them from OneDrive itself,” according to PCWorld.