Earlier this year, we shared a few tips for students to work together with SkyDrive and Office on important projects—without compromising formatting or features. We heard great feedback and we look forward to sharing winners from our Collaboration Challenge soon! Increasingly, we see students and teachers use services like SkyDrive to store everything in one place for easy sharing and access anywhere on campus. We call this your “cloud backpack”. In this post, Mark Grimaldi on the SkyDrive product marketing team will share a few tips to use SkyDrive this way. - Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive
Earlier this year, we shared a few tips for students to work together with SkyDrive and Office on important projects—without compromising formatting or features. We heard great feedback and we look forward to sharing winners from our Collaboration Challenge soon!
Increasingly, we see students and teachers use services like SkyDrive to store everything in one place for easy sharing and access anywhere on campus. We call this your “cloud backpack”. In this post, Mark Grimaldi on the SkyDrive product marketing team will share a few tips to use SkyDrive this way.
- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive
If you’re a student, it’s the same routine every day. You gather everything you need—your notebook for class, binder full of handouts, readings or homework assignments, textbooks, laptop, smartphone and maybe even your tablet. And of course your power adapters. Then you stuff it all into your backpack—everything you think you might need throughout the day—because you may not be back home until it’s time for bed.
Surely, there must be a better way to have everything you might need without hauling it around with you everywhere you go.
Well, there is. With SkyDrive, you get a “cloud backpack” where you can store, create and access all of your documents, notes, photos or files from anywhere. Our new SkyDrive at School page shows how anyone can get started with a cloud backpack, but we wanted to share a few extra tips to help you go “all in.”
OneNote 2010 is a powerful note-taking application that’s great for school. With OneNote, you can organize your notes by your classes, instantly search through them, draw graphs or diagrams, and even record your lectures. If you’re not using OneNote yet, check out these tips on the OneNote Blog to get started.
To make OneNote even more useful for you, connect it to SkyDrive and try these suggestions:
By saving your notebook on SkyDrive, you can access it from any computer (even a Mac!) using the OneNote Web App. You can also study on-the-go since OneNote is also available on pretty much every mobile device.
To save your OneNote notebook to SkyDrive, just click File and then Share to save it on the web.
Whether for class or a research project, you can send printouts, screenshots or web clippings right to OneNote to stay organized.
Find a helpful website for your research paper? Just highlight what you want from Internet Explorer and right click Send to OneNote 2010 to insert it into your notebook. You can send a whole webpage, a paragraph or image. OneNote will even show where you copied the content from so you can easily cite and reference it later.
Have a PDF or some other file from your professor? You can Print directly to your OneNote notebook and save it next to your notes from the same lecture.
To take a snapshot of anything on your screen, press Windows + S on your keyboard. You can also drop and drag an entire file into OneNote from your desktop.
By default, OneNote always asks where you want new notes to go. You can set a default preference by clicking File, Options, and then Send to OneNote. If you select a notebook that’s synced to SkyDrive, you can rest assured that anything you send to OneNote will be available anywhere, automatically.
With all of your notes in the cloud, you can easily share them with your friends and classmates. From SkyDrive.com, just right click your notebook and select Share.
If you want, you can even give them access to your notebook so that they can add their own notes. Now everyone can work together in the same notebook, and studying for finals just got a little easier.
Odds are, you’re either working on an important project right now or will be shortly. Well, SkyDrive can help keep you more organized and make sure that you’re never without the files that you need.
When you install SkyDrive for Windows or Mac, you get a SkyDrive folder on your computer. Everything you save or copy there is automatically synced to your SkyDrive. So move your spreadsheets, downloaded articles, and everything else you’ve gathered. No matter what happens to your computer, you can easily get to your stuff from any web browser.
SkyDrive does more than store your files. It also works with free Office Web Apps so you can view, edit and print from any web browser.
If you’re working on a Word document on your laptop at the library and your battery dies, you can easily pick up right where you left off just by logging into SkyDrive.com at the computer lab. If you get inspired on the bus ride back home, you can update your document using the Office Hub on your Windows Phone. You can rest assured that your formatting remains intact.
Any changes you make will be waiting to sync when you plug in your computer back at your dorm room.
What’s more, SkyDrive also keeps track of the various versions of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So don’t worry about renaming your files V1, V2… V14a. Just work in the documents saved in your SkyDrive folder and SkyDrive will take care of the rest.
You’ve been there before. You’re at the computer lab ready to print out your paper and you forgot your USB drive. Or you’re away from your computer and you realize you didn’t email your TA your homework assignment. Or maybe you’ve just met someone at a company you’d like to work for and you want to send them your résumé, but you won’t be home for hours.
These aren’t a problem anymore. Even if you forget to put something in your SkyDrive folder—or never thought you’d need it there—you can still access it from any computer. SkyDrive for Windows lets you fetch any file on your personal computer (as long as it’s online) from SkyDrive.com.
Once you find that paper to print, you can click Copy to SkyDrive and use Word Web App to view, print and share.
From handouts to class readings, old notes or recent assignments, you have so much paper to carry around and keep organized. Why not scan and upload everything to SkyDrive?
Use a smartphone app like Handyscan for Windows Phone (shown below) or Docscan for iPhone to create PDF versions of all of your handouts, homework, or even lecture notes from your friends. You can save the files directly to SkyDrive and they’ll be synced across your devices.
If you want to do more – like add comments or keep scans alongside class notes, you can import PDFs and other files into OneNote.
USB drives are easily left behind. Emailing yourself documents makes it easy to lose track of the latest version or crowds your inbox.
With SkyDrive, you can access everything, all around campus, from any web browser. You can also use the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad, or Android apps—no matter where you are.
While we hope these tips are helpful, we know it will take some time before everyone upgrades to a “cloud backpack”. Here are a few ways you can help:
If you are a teacher, share class materials or class notes directly using SkyDrive. You can also provide feedback on assignments and papers through shared documents.
If you are a developer, use our APIs to integrate SkyDrive into applications that students use and love.
And if you are a student, what tips did we miss? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter how you’re using a cloud backpack today. We can help spread the word!
Mark Grimaldi, Product Marketing Manager, SkyDrive
This week, we’ve seen a welcome update from Dropbox, a new chapter for SkyDrive and the long awaited emergence of Google Nessie. Is it only Wednesday?
We’re very encouraged by the response we’ve received this week, and it’s hard not to be pretty happy when we hear positive feedback on all of the improvements we’ve made and the value we provide vs. other solutions. But the most exciting thing for us has been the response from our customers. We’ve been thrilled to hear from you on Twitter and blogs, and we’ve had an overwhelming number of downloads of SkyDrive across Windows 8, Windows 7, iOS and Mac. We're listening to your feedback for the future, and we’ll keep adding storage and bandwidth as fast as we can. Thank you!
With this week’s events, it can be fun and useful to compare features across services. We’ve seen these charts across the web, and of course we recently updated our own chart.
However these comparisons often neglect one thing. Is each provider actually trying to build similar experiences? As we look at the category, we see our approach with SkyDrive is increasingly unique.
We don’t think people want another file cloud to manage. They don't want an app cloud tied to one browser, social network or ad network. They don't want yet another proprietary device cloud. People want a cloud that seamlessly connects their files to the apps and devices they use every day.
Over a billion people rely on Office apps and their Windows devices every day to create, capture and share from anywhere. That’s why we’re building personal cloud storage for our customers that works seamlessly with Office and Windows.
Of course we know Office and Windows customers have other devices and use other apps. We want them to enjoy SkyDrive too, so we’re working to make it available anywhere – directly and in partnership with developers.
As we do all of this, there should be no doubt that our business model is aligned with your interests.
So how exactly will SkyDrive let you work seamlessly with Office and Windows from anywhere? We thought we’d share a few things you can try today.
OneNote: Capture notes, voice clips, scans and more on the go. Access and search later Over the years, people have called OneNote a hidden gem. Thankfully more people are discovering it with the launch of OneNote for Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone. Use your phone to take notes, record voice clips, scan documents and sync them instantly to SkyDrive. Your stuff is pushed to OneNote 2010 on your PC where you can organize and search – even audio and images. You can share notebooks with your spouse, friends or teams who can use OneNote Web App - free.
Fetch files in Windows: Turn your PC into a private cloud to access any file, not just what’s in the cloud Moving files to the cloud offers many advantages – particularly for sharing and collaboration. However, you shouldn’t have to upload everything just to access it anywhere. With “fetch”, SkyDrive works seamlessly with your Windows PC so you can access any file from anywhere. You can even stream videos. Windows transcodes your video automatically to fit your connection.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Every app connects to the cloud, no setup required With SkyDrive for Windows, the cloud is another folder on your desktop. Any existing Windows app that can access the file system can now access SkyDrive. SkyDrive for Windows 8 also brings a seamless cloud experience to new Windows 8 apps. This opens up new possibilities, for example, using SkyDrive together with apps available now in the Windows Store like Mail, Docstoc and Skitch.
Please try these out today, share your feedback – and tell your friends. In the coming months, you’ll see SkyDrive continue to bring seamless personal cloud storage to Windows and Office that’s available anywhere.
On Monday, we released preview versions of SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, along with updates for iOS and Windows Phone. With SkyDrive on your desktop, you can now access files in the cloud right from any of your PC or Mac apps. And since we launched our API, we’ve been excited to see mobile, web, and Windows 8 developers add SkyDrive to their apps.
A key principle behind the approach we’ve taken with the SkyDrive developer platform is that while it should be seamlessly accessible from Windows devices and apps, it should also be ready to enable developers on any platform to build apps that make SkyDrive more useful. It’s your data. It should not be limited to apps for a single browser or brand of devices.
Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas.
Developers of Android apps can use the Live SDK for Android to build mobile and tablet apps that provide access to a user’s documents and photos in SkyDrive. The SDK supports Android versions 2.2 (Froyo) to 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Browser for SkyDrive (below) is one of our most popular SkyDrive apps on Android. For more information see our getting started docs for Android development.
With SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, users can transparently cloud-enable their desktop apps without needing to customize the apps since the SkyDrive folder looks like a regular folder on the file system. This opens up literally millions of new possibilities for users.
In some cases, a desktop app may want to integrate directly with SkyDrive, without relying on the user having SkyDrive installed. For example, the SkyDrive gadget for Xobni brings powerful cloud-based sharing to Outlook, making it easy to share large files with email recipients without worrying about large file size limitations.
For more information see our getting started docs for desktop development.
In addition to the SkyDrive for iPhone and iPad, SkyDrive customers can also use any iPhone or iPad apps that use our SDK for iOS to integrate with SkyDrive. The SDK supports development using Xcode 4.1 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Xcode 4.2 on Mac OS X Lion.
A great example of an iOS app that integrates well with SkyDrive is DocScan. When there is no scanner available, DocScan lets you instantly scan multi-page documents with your iPhone, then annotate, and store them in the cloud for later use .
For more information see our getting started docs for iOS development
Not only are developers already delivering great SkyDrive apps that people can download to their Android and other phones – but some of the biggest Android OEMs like HTC have also already built SkyDrive right into their phones. HTC’s newest 4.0 devices such as the HTC One X come with SkyDrive, letting you seamlessly work with your SkyDrive photos and documents from their native Mail, Gallery, and Polaris Office experiences.
We have been excited by the enthusiasm for SkyDrive of people making other consumer devices like cameras. Samsung’s new line of WiFi enabled SMART cameras (Amazon) enables users to never lose their valuable memories by uploading pictures to SkyDrive directly from the camera.
On Windows Phone, there have already been dozens of apps that have taken advantage of our SDK for Windows Phone. Apps such as HandyScan (shown below) augment SkyDrive’s seamless integration into the Office and Pictures hub on the phone by bringing personal cloud storage to the apps Windows Phone customers use every day.
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For more information see our getting started docs for Windows Phone development
As you can tell, we’re really proud of some of the apps that have integrated with SkyDrive and would like to share them with as many people as possible. That is why, with our release on Monday, we’ve also launched a new app showcase. Now millions of SkyDrive users can discover apps from third party developers that make it easier to share or work from anywhere. The showcase is available from within SkyDrive.com, so users can easily find apps while using the service.
Every month, we’ll add apps to our showcase based on usage and positive feedback from customers. Let us know about apps you like by telling us on Twitter.
To recap, developers can learn more about the SkyDrive API by visiting dev.live.com. You’ll find links to code samples on GitHub and overview docs, and you can also download our SDKs for Windows 8, WP7, iOS, and Android to simplify development on your favorite device platform. We also have REST APIs and a JavaScript API for web development.
To get the word out about how SkyDrive can help you and your apps, we’ll be attending and sponsoring a few developer events in the coming weeks:
Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet you. We’ll be available to help with questions you have on SkyDrive, and we’ll also have cool t-shirts to give away and some other special prizes for people integrating SkyDrive with their apps at these hackathons. Hope to see you there.
Dare Obasanjo Lead Program Manager, Live Connect Platform
Update, April 24, 2012: Please note: Even though it works great and shows off our developer APIs, SkyCMD was our April Fool’s joke for 2012. However, check out these real improvements to SkyDrive.
Update, April 24, 2012:
Please note: Even though it works great and shows off our developer APIs, SkyCMD was our April Fool’s joke for 2012. However, check out these real improvements to SkyDrive.
The past year has been an amazing time here on the SkyDrive team. We’re all very eager to ship the work we announced in our next release, but we can’t just sit back and relax. Like a shark, we have to keep moving forward. As we started to think about the next generation interface for SkyDrive, we needed something fresh. It’s too easy to get caught up in the visual distraction of a traditional GUI, especially when you really just want to see a directory listing of your files. As we pulled together the vision, our design principles included getting back to our monochromatic roots, presenting the user with fewer commands, all while providing the most powerful interface possible. So what is the next big thing?
The more we thought about it, the more we realized that the model we were looking for was right in front of us – or at least used to be. We harkened back to a time when computing was simpler. Sure, interface design has changed over the years, but do people really want to navigate through their files with the flick of a finger or view photos with a click of a mouse? Maybe. But we believe the first and best way for humans to interact with computers is through terse commands entered via the good old keyboard. That’s when it hit us: what the world needs is a SkyDrive Command Line Interface!
Starting today, you can finally interact with SkyDrive the way you’ve always wanted to. You can use the classic DOS syntax to easily navigate your file hierarchy—familiar commands like “dir” and “cd.” Simple. Powerful.
SkyCMD: Command line access to your files on SkyDrive. Go to http://skycmd.com and check it out.
Once you connect SkyCMD to your SkyDrive account you can do many of the powerful things that only a CLI can offer. As for customization, try the “color” command to give your SkyCMD window a little flare.
One of our amazing developers, Luke, came up with the early rendition of SkyCMD and showed it around the SkyDrive hallways a couple months ago. We all loved it and knew that if it had a few more obscure commands and the right ASCII art we had a winner on our hands. The volume of internal feature requests for SkyCMD grew to the point that we’ve put the entire SkyDrive engineering organization to work building it. Our developer APIs, which Dare Obasanjo wrote about in his blog post back in December, are so powerful we just used those. We have even put the source code out as part of our sample code.
Of course in the near future we are going to ship what we recently announced and then some. But going forward the future of SkyDrive is SkyCMD!
Tony East Lead Program Manager, SkyDrive.com
Hotmail introduced advanced features for fighting the war on graymail this past fall, and since then, customers have conquered graymail over 100 million times using features like Sweep and Schedule Cleanup. In this post, I’ll talk about how Hotmail customers are taking control of their email with Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, and Hotmail’s newsletter filter, and we’ll show you how these tools can help you conquer graymail in your own inbox in just 60 seconds.
Graymail—messages like newsletters, daily deals, and notifications—is filling up inboxes all over the world. Newsletters alone typically make up more than 50% of a person’s email. Managing all that graymail takes time and can be a hassle. Hotmail continues to add innovative features to let you take control of graymail and take back your inbox.
Hotmail’s newsletter category automatically identifies most newsletters and lets you see them all in one place with a single click. One-click unsubscribe lets you get rid of unwanted newsletters instantly.
Schedule Cleanup is a powerful new feature that lets you automatically manage bulk mail. With Schedule Cleanup, you can:
Schedule Cleanup not only takes care of the mail you’ve already received, but keeps working for you as you receive new mail. It’s one of the most efficient ways to keep your inbox tidy.
Sweep lets you move or delete unwanted graymail quickly and easily, and can even automatically set up rules for managing new mail as it arrives.
Categories let you organize your mail the way you want. Hotmail automatically categorizes things like newsletters, social updates, photos, Office docs and shipping updates. Now, you can create your own categories and have each one show up as a QuickView.
And of course, these features work well together. Categories can be used together with Schedule Cleanup, making those tools even more powerful. For instance, you can use Schedule Cleanup to delete all newsletters as they get old, just by using Schedule Cleanup on the newsletter category.
It’s been just two months since we finished the deployment of our most recent major release, and we’ve already seen millions of people use these tools to quickly take control of their own inbox. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.
Since November, 2011, customers have performed over 100 million actions to conquer graymail: Sweeping, categorizing, and using Schedule Cleanup.
And what’s more, we’re seeing an increasing use of these powerful tools. Each month, more people use Sweep and Schedule Cleanup to get rid of their graymail. In fact, we’ve seen a double-digit increase in the use of these features month-over-month since our October release.
The best news is that these tools are quick and easy to use. In this video, we’ll show you how you can take back your own inbox in just 60 seconds.
More and more people are using Hotmail’s innovative tools to fight their own war on graymail, and we hope you’ll give these tools a try yourself. We’d love to hear about your own experience using Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, categories, and the rest.
As always, thanks for using Hotmail.
Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail