Windows Live SkyDrive Team Blog

Thanks for all the comments and feedback on our new release! We’ve received a bunch of great feature suggestions, many of which we hope to address in upcoming releases. The biggest request we’ve seen is to make SkyDrive more widely available. We plan to roll out in many more markets in the next year, so stay tuned!

Here are the other top requests so far:

• Allowing multiple downloads at once.
• Displaying how many times a file has been downloaded.
• Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
• Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
• Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.

Any other feature requests or cool ideas? Leave a comment! And thanks for using SkyDrive.

- The SkyDrive Team

With the new release of SkyDrive, we’re excited to show you two new ways to stay up-to-date on the latest files from your friends.

Want to know when someone shares new files on SkyDrive?
Easy. Simply add them to your Windows Live Messenger contact list. When they share new files on SkyDrive, a yellow “gleam” appears next to their name and their contact card shows the last few files they’ve uploaded.

Here’s a contact card with three files: a video and
two photos. You can click the files on the contact
card to access them directly.

Want to see what your friends are sharing across Windows Live?
Simply visit your Spaces home to see what your friends have been up to, including the latest files they’ve shared with you on SkyDrive. You can read more about this feature here http://robdolin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3C8CA60F8F925FEC!884.entry

Here’s an example of a Spaces home. From this page, Rob can see everything
his friends have been up to on Windows Live, including the recent files they’ve
shared with him on SkyDrive.

Good luck, and as always, we appreciate your feedback.

Thanks,
SkyDrive Team

These past couple of months since our last release, we asked ourselves, “What can we do to make SkyDrive even better?” The most obvious answer is something that our users have asked us to do: give out more storage. We’re excited to announce that we’re doubling everyone’s storage to 1 GB!

Many users told us, “Hey, we want to be notified when someone adds a file to a specific folder,” so we added RSS feeds to public folders. To subscribe to an RSS feed, go to the public folder that you’re interested in, and click on the orange RSS Feed icon at the top right of the page. Then, anytime that folder is updated, you’ll be notified. We love this feature because we get notified as soon as our friends upload new files to their folders.

Another thing users told us is that it’s difficult to share a folder with people that aren’t in your address book. People said, “We have to go to Hotmail or Messenger in order to add someone to our address books. Why can’t we just do it on SkyDrive itself?” We fixed that. Now, you can share with anyone directly from SkyDrive by typing in your friend’s e-mail address.

Finally, users told us that it would be nice to know who uploaded each file. So, we now display the name of the person that added each file.

We’re excited about these new features, and we hope you like them. Check out the new version, and let us know what you think.

--Windows Live SkyDrive Team

Here’s the best way to make changes to a file that you’ve uploaded to your SkyDrive:

1. Download the file to a known location on your hard drive
2. Edit and save that file just like any normal file on your hard drive
3. When you're finished making changes, visit SkyDrive and navigate to the folder where you originally downloaded the file
4. Click Add files and upload the file

SkyDrive will automatically replace the older version of the file as long as the new version has the same name.

We're always listening for your feedback, so let us know how it goes!

-The SkyDrive Team